TEHANI PESTALOZZI - Taking a leap of faith for tibetan children and their environment.

By PAULA PANT

High in the remote depths of the Tibetan Plateau, a young woman from Boulder, Colorado, was hedging her bets that 57 refugee children could be the saviors of their rapidly developing mountain town.

The children had all fled religious persecution in Tibet to settle in Ladakh, an autonomous region in northwestern India. Ages ten to 14, these middle-schoolers are now growing up in the midst of an industrial revolution.

A road was recently built that allows trucks to quickly access the Ladaki capital, Lei, which is nestled in the Himalayas at about 13,000 feet. What used to be a harrowing, two-week journey by horseback turned into a simple, three-day trip by vehicle.

Scores of tourists followed. Scooters, electrical generators, cell phones and Coca-Cola bottles now permeate this once-remote land high in the Hindu Kush.

On the opposite side of the world, in her 5,000-foot altitude home in Boulder, Tehani Pestalozzi was introduced to these children though photos and letters sent to her family.

“I guess the first real involvement in this project is my dad,” she told a crowd of about 20 people seated at a September slideshow depicting her summer in Ladakh.

Her father sponsored the education, room and board and health care for some of the Tibetan refugee children in Ladakh for a period of ten years.

“In a certain sense, he wanted us to have brothers and sisters everywhere,” said Pestalozzi.

In 2003, he took Pestalozzi and her sister Atalie to visit the children that their family had raised from a distance.

“I fell in love with the land, the people,” said Pestalozzi, “and at the same time, I was shocked by the development that was taking place in Ladakh.”

Pestaloozi, 20, says she recognizes that development is inevitable, and in many cases, it's what the locals desire. But she longed to see it happen responsibly.

The lessons taken for granted in developed countries - simple lessons, like the importance of not littering - are lost on those who are encountering plastic wrappers for the first time, she said.

“I saw kids, when they bought candy, throw the wrapper on the street when there was a trash can a few yards away,” said Pestalozzi. “I saw a woman dump her whole bucket of trash straight into the river.”

She realized that it was simply a lack of knowledge, an unawareness of cause and effect, that was causing the Ladaki residents to blatantly trash their surroundings.

So she embarked on the ambitious task of starting an organization that would educate Tibetan refugee children living in Ladakh about environmental stewardship.

The organization, which she named the Heartspring Project, formed the seemingly simple goal of running a nine-day long camp for middle-school children that taught environmental awareness.

It required more logistical planning than Pestalozzi ever anticipated.

She needed to find land where the camp could be held. Tents that the camp could be held under. Lunches for the children. Dinners for the staff. She needed t-shirts and supplies for the children. And of course, she needed to recruit participating children.

None of which were particularly easy tasks to accomplish from her home about 12 time zones away, in a region where she had few connections and didn't speak the language, and where a simple letter takes several weeks to arrive at its destination.

Fortunately, Pestalozzi had some risk-taking role models in her life.

“My mom was always pretty adventurous,” she said.

Pestaloozi's mother, Saori Ino, was born and raised into a family of Buddhist monks in Japan, just outside of Kyoto. At a young age, she rejected the often strict and demure lifestyle that came with her “temple family” upbringing.

As a single Japanese woman traveling alone, Pestalozzi's mother explored the depths of Africa and Europe before embarking on a tour of the United States to learn English.

Chartering faraway lands on solo expeditions, Pestalozzi said that her mother simply took a leap of faith that everything would work out.

It ultimately did. Taking flight lessons while traveling in Colorado, Saori fell in love with her piloting instructor, David, who quickly became her husband and Pestalozzi's father.

“I guess for a Japanese woman she was very advanced, she traveled a lot,” said Pestalozzi.

Pestalozzi placed that same blind trust into the success of the Heartspring Project. Case-in-point: at the time Pestaloozi was scheduled to depart for Ladakh, she still hadn't raised enough money.

Two grant proposals had been rejected.

She held her breath and simply trusted that somehow, the money she needed - a total of $2,000 - would come through.

It did within a few weeks.

“I didn't get any responses for a long time,” said Pestalozzi, “and suddenly people just started stepping up.”

In all, 22 donors made the project a possibility.

Once Pestaloozi's plane touched down, she still hadn't solved the problem of where the camp would be held, or how it would be housed.

“Sometimes, you just have to take a leap of faith,” said Pestalozzi.

She began pounding the pavement in search of answers, and soon met General Tenzin La, the caretaker of the Dalai Lama's home. (Although the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism is exiled in Dharamsala, India, he also keeps a home in Ladakh.)

The caretaker agreed to let her hold the environmental education camp in His Holiness' front yard. (Pestalozzi would occasionally arrive in the morning to find the caretaker giving religious teachings to the barn sheep, in the belief they may attain enlightenment.)

The general also linked Pestaloozi to the Tibetan Army (“Who knew Tibet had an army?” said Pestalozzi), which agreed to truck tents to the campsite.

She contacted school officials who rounded up 57 children to participate in the nine-day camp. Many were orphans or had fled into refuge without their parents, and most attended school only thanks to Western sponsorships, said Pestalozzi. Many of the children live at the school year-round because they have no other family.

The Heartspring Project became a family affair, managed and taught by Pestalozzi, her sister and one of her friends. Her father flew out three weeks after Pestalozzi arrived to lend a hand.

“Working with them - they know me the best,” Pestalozzi said of her sister and father.

Pestalozzi's mother, who moved back to Japan several years ago to care for her aging parents, donated to the project. Though Pestalozzi spoke to her mom and grandma over the phone about the camp several times, Pestalozzi says she suspects they don't understand the extent of her achievement.

“In Japan, young people and women don't really do stuff like that,” said Pestalozzi.

Yet her mother's influence helped Pestalozzi achieve one of her primary goals: to make the camp “as culturally relevant as possible.”

Pestalozzi has visited her family in Japan “over 20 times.” Every summer throughout her childhood, she attended the Buddhist summer camp her two uncles founded and ran.

Some of the games she learned in that camp in Japan, she taught to her campers in Ladakh, she said.

Her understanding of Japanese Buddhism, gleaned from those visits to her mom, helped her work with the predominantly Tibetan Buddhist refugee children in Ladakh, she said.

“I (was able to) incorporate some of these ideas of Buddhism - things like cyclesŠ the idea of nonviolence,” into the environmental education framework, said Pestalozzi.

Using, for example, the Buddhist cycle of life, death and rebirth as a model, Pestalozzi could outline “simple ideas like biodegradable and nonbiodegradable.”

“Another goal of the camp,” said Pestalozzi, “was to partner with the local community.”

So she contacted a Women's Alliance in Ladakh and asked them to engage in a litter cleanup project with the children from her camp.

“Pretty much everything that gets done, gets done partly because of the women in the region,” said Pestalozzi. “They're all mothers of young kids, and they're worried about the changes that are coming about.”

About 40 mothers belonging to the group picked up trash along the riverside, while their own young children played along the banks.

Meanwhile the children from the camp - many of whom are orphans, or who fled to Ladakh without parental accompaniment - found maternal influences from the women's alliance.

“Moms are the biggest educators in any community,” said Pestalozzi. She said the Women's Alliance decided to teach local mothers “to tell their kids not to throw their trash on the ground.”

In fact, several women's alliance members said they were excited about continuing environmental education efforts year-round.

One such woman was Dolker, a Ladaki mother, around 30, who has one daughter, age five, and two twins, a two-year-old boy and girl.

Dolker, who spoke perfect English, invited the camp leaders over for tea and snacks and discussed her disgust with the litter and pollution in the area.

Pestalozzi donated the camps' leftover funds to the Women's Alliance. She and her sister Atalie are now working on an initiative to forge a long-term partnership between the Women's Alliance and the movement to teach environmental stewardship to Ladakh's children.

To learn more, visit www.heartspringproject.org.

Original article reprduced from Women's Magazine: www.boulderwomensmag.com/articles/2006/11/01/news/profile/profile.txt