A Good News Story, for a change you can relieve in

I was drowning in the tsunami of horrific headlines about the mammoth mess our world has become when the adorable Karma Dolma pulled up in her boyfriend's blue Honda and knocked on my door. More than five years had passed since we'd last been together. She was a post graduate at Rinpoche's boarding school in Boudha, the Tibetan quartier of Kathmandu, Nepal, running the cooking classes I sponsored. At translating for me, at accounting for every rupee, at marshaling the children every Saturday morning, whatever it took to keep those classes going, she did competently and cheerfully.

By then Karma Dolma, who was maybe 17, spoke four languages: Nepali, Tibetan, English and her native Manangi, the dialect of the Himalayan people on the far side of Annapurna. When at the age of 5 she was brought down from her mud and stone hut up there, she was an illiterate yak herder, dirty and plagued by parasites--the norm in the remote regions of Himalayan Nepal because the arrogant Hindu Brahmins in Kathmandu treat all Buddhist realms as nonexistent. 

She'd passed the Nepalese school graduation exam, given after Grade 10, with a near perfect score and was waiting around to get a scholarship to finish the last two years of high school somewhere abroad. After two years, Zurich offered opportunity and off she went, carefully passing control of cooking class to another high mountain, recent graduate of Grade 10, Tashi Dolma. 

Essentially Karma Dolma was penniless so money was raised for her first ever airplane flight, from Kathmandu to Zurich, and a local family with two young boys took her in. She took to learning German-- the Swiss version of it to be exact, learning Western ways, learning to ski, learning to live in a real house--the school has only dormitories, and learning bigger English words so she could complete two years of international school in that language.  

It wasn't easy but she did it all. And made a pile of Swiss friends along the way. She learned to bake cookies and sing in chorus and act in the Christmas pageant. She even blogged about it all--in English. And over the summer, she raised the money to fly back to Manang to teach in the new village school. Indignant anger at the fierce Nepali corruption and harassment of her ethnically Tibetan people made her want to work to rise high enough in the world to put them down.

Because Karma Dolma was totally penniless, she was rejected by the five American colleges she applied to. (The family in Zurich had been charitable enough to help her all they could, but couldn't keep it up.)  Somehow a saint in Halifax got her a scholarship to a university there, for half the tuition, and agreed to house her if Karma Dolma could find the needed other half tuition: $9,000. So I mounted a campaign between the US and Canada and somehow by the blessing of the Buddha, we did it, on time. One way airfare included.

So here was this beautiful, small Manangi woman now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, going to a Catholic college where everything is in English. She got a job working in the cafeteria--her cooking class background sealed the deal, and over the summer she worked two jobs while taking classes. We raised $9,000 again for her sophomore year, although just barely this time because so many people are just trying to help themselves survive right now. I was dreading this year, worrying how we were going to find those funds, worrying that the last thing her uncle, one of Rinpoche's precious Khenpos or teachers, asked of me before he left Vancouver for a new post in Asia was to "take care of Karma Dolma so she makes it safely."

Karma Dolma finished her sophomore year with a not inflated B+ average. Her major is International Development with a minor in Business.  She did real marketing surveys and business plans including one on electric cars that involved Tesla (that's how up to the minute smart she is), mastered economics and geography, and of course like everyone her age she's totally literate in computer and iPhone. 

I suspect she got help with getting up to speed on that from her boyfriend. He majored in technology and works for a software firm. He's a Canadian born in Hong Kong. One of the reasons it's so heartwarming to watch them taking such loving care of each other is that he's Chinese and she's Tibetan.

Of course time and kids roll on. This was, after all, her first face-to- face peek at America. After breakfast, she was gone. First to see a cousin in Boston and Boston itself, then on to New York where her sister, on full scholarship at Skidmore, is working in a restaurant for the summer. So from the hightop of Manang to the see level of Manhattan: the Statue of Liberty, the Metropolitan Museum, and her favorite place, MOMA. To save money, she and her boyfriend stayed at an Airbnb room somewhere in New Jersey.

She also found plenty of her people in Queens and gorged on Nepali dhal bhat. "It's hard for me to speak Nepali any more," she said when she came back, on the way home, looking very stylish in a striped cotton frock. She'd had a splendid week in America, memories to carry her through a summer of classes and two minimum wage jobs: one waiting tables by day at a Thai restaurant and one tending to sick people in a hospital at night.

For breakfast, we had coffee and croissants. (She loves coffee although she comes from a strong tea culture.) Her boyfriend brought downstairs all the towels and sheets they'd used, immaculately folded. She packed the remains of the Nepali dinner I'd made for a frugal picnic lunch and off she went with her boyfriend back to Halifax, radiantly grateful and buoyant. "Life is good," she said. "It's been hard but people like you help me so I know I can do it. My dreams are coming true, even though sometimes I just can't believe it."


~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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