I have finally met Dr. Tamara Blesh, the "Traveling Librarian." She is a school media specialist with an interest in Ladakh- specifically the Siddhartha School. It is a Tibetan Buddhist school in Choskor, Stok. (This is the same Stok that has the Hemis National Park, home of the few remaining snow leopards in the world. It is a stunningly beautiful setting.) Tamara is on the school's Board of Directors, and her Rinpoche- Khen Rinpoche Tsetan- has a significant hand in running the school. We visited this school last year, and it is very nice- and has a huge, sunny, well-stocked library room. http://siddharthaschool.org/about/history.html
There is an ongoing and lively debate over whether any instruction at all should be in "mother-tongue"- that is, in Ladakhi. Ladakhi does not have a written tradition, although it is a seperate language from Tibetan. I think the argument is similar to the one about allowing Catalan to be used in schools near Barcelona. Ladakhi is what is spoken at home for most of these children. It is not just a dialect or accent issue. The languages are seperate and discrete. The Tibetans maintain that since the sacred scriptures are written in Tibetan, that language is essential for an education.
Add to the mix the universal feeling that English is very important, and fact that Urdu is the state language of J & K, while Hindi is the official language of India, and you have a proper mess. The youngest kids don' t know what is going on for quite a while- until they pick up enough something to at least follow instructions. It reminds me of going to Catholic School in the 1950's, where Church Latin was taught by rote to everyone from 1st grade on up, and students who were old enough took Latin in High School. Gabriele Reifenberg (more on this remarkable person later!) commented that the difference was that no one expected you to really be able to speak Latin- but she had never met Sacred Heart Academy's Sister Jean Dorothy! (Ubi o ubi est me sub ubi?)
Long story short, Tamara is interested in organizing school libraries here in Ladakh using pretty much a US model. The proposal for which she is seeking funding would compare school scores from a private (Siddartha) school, a state school with a school library, and a state school without a library. She is hoping to demonstrate that schools with decent school libraries perform better. There are many extraneous factors that will be difficult to either match or rule out , so she has many interesting years of work ahead of her.
Heather and I helped her by editing a proposal that was submitted to Room to Read and that she will submit elsewhere, should R to R not pan out. It is a little outside their regular process, but who knows, it may interest them. Cynthia Hunt really wants whatever grant that materializes to include a piece on mother tongue books as part of the library. She has written a number of heavily illustrated instructional books that have been translated into Ladakhi, and would like to see them get more widespread distribution. I've gotten the impression that Room to Read is more interested in native language books written by native language speakers, but since many Ladakhi presses (therefore authors) have been supressed, it may take a while to cultivate enough writers. I have looked (using all my mad library research skills) and haven't unearthed any Ladakhi books for children- written in Ladakhi.
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