Bryan Campbell, a sophomore art/broadcast major with a minor in history, traveled to Dharamsala, India last summer to meet Tibetans living in exile and document their stories. This opportunity came through the TEXT Project (Tibetans in Exile Today), an oral history program based at the University of Arkansas. Bryan is working on a documentary film about this experience.
We arrived in India in the dead of night after a fifteen-hour plane ride. We were welcomed into the country by a dicey rush through customs, a scramble for our luggage, the powerful stench of body odor mixed with unwashed animal, and a hurtling car ride down the packed Indian interstate, weaving around bicycles, water buffalo, in addition to slower cars. We could see homeless people sleeping on barriers in the middle of the interstate, lying inches from the steady stream of deadly swerving tires.
After forty-five minutes of driving, we arrived at where our guides said we would be staying. A gang of short Indian bellhops (we later learned that they were actually orphaned Nepali bellhops) materialized out of a dark alleyway and grabbed some of the luggage off of our cars, beckoned us to follow them, and disappeared back into the blackness. We quickly grabbed the rest of our bags and hurried after them, wandering down the alleys (we would later learn that these were actually the main streets of the Tibetan settlement we were staying in) that were so dark you could barely see the hand covering your nose due to the stench of human sewage filling the air. After a couple of twists we finally arrived at the Ama Guest house, the place that would become our home base for the adventures in the weeks to come. Keys to our rooms were handed out and we mounted the stairs, exhausted, ready to collapse, with the knowledge that we would be waking up early tomorrow for the adventure to really begin.
All of this happened within the course of our first hour in India, an hour that was mostly spent riding in a car. So you can see, to accurately describe our entire experience would require a novel of a blog entry.
To describe our daily routine is simple—there wasn’t one. Every day we would wake up to a new adventure, and entirely new challenges.
To describe the food is impossible. The names were difficult, the ingredients varied and foreign. Our diet was somewhat limited due to the potential for us to get parasites from the water, but on the whole the food was some of the best I’ve ever eaten.
Instead of focusing on those things, I’m going to focus on the people we met. The purpose of our trip was an oral history, with the aim to give voices to Tibetans (mostly senior citizens) living in exile in India, having fled their homeland from Chinese rule. As such, meeting and interviewing people was part of our goal, and it is those people (as opposed to the routine or the food) who really left the deepest impact on my life.
We interviewed senior monks, who were charismatic and wise, who told their stories of suffering and hardship with scholastic accuracy and yet with relative apathy towards their own plight. We interviewed younger monks who were friendly, humble, and very gracious toward us for the opportunity to tell their stories. We interviewed an old woman who told us of her youth in the Tibetan nobility, and of her journey on horseback through the mountains to find her new life of poverty. We interviewed young men (who were my age!) who had been caught and tortured by the Chinese just for being who they were. We interviewed a famous political activist—labeled a terrorist by the Chinese government—and listened to his eloquent words as he spoke not only for himself, but for the entire nation of Tibetans living in exile, outlining how insurmountable the obstacles seem, and yet testifying that they will never give up on the hope that some day their homeland will be returned to them.
It was these people, not the monuments or museums we visited, that left a mark. It was hearing their stories that showed me the extent of the injustices suffered by the Tibetans in their homeland. And it was the knowledge that through meeting these people and recording their stories that some small amount of impact could be made that showed me the real value of this trip—that I am not the only one getting something out of it.