A Life Lived For Others Is A Life Well Lived

do you remember

the last vacation you took at a very

popular tourism destination

do you know where you went where did you

hear about this place

did you see it on someone’s facebook

page or did you come across it in the

movies

and when you went there did you actually

go to just the tourism spots

or did you go beyond did you see what

was beyond those tourism spots

did you talk to your cab driver did you

go into a little village did you sit and

eat a meal with a

local villager 10 years ago

i went on a vacation to just a very

popular tourism destination in india

a place called ladakh ladakh is a high

altitude mountainous region

in the himalayan territory of india and

10 years ago it wasn’t as popular as it

was today as it is today

i went on a solo trek little realizing

anything about the region i had no idea

on my bucket list was just the two or

three treks that i wanted to do

being the over confident trekker that i

was i didn’t acclimatize as well and i

felt extremely ill

here’s the part that was different

i fell ill in a little village which is

part of my trek which had exactly

one family in that can you imagine a

village with exactly one family

the nearest other village was about four

hour walk away

so here i am cut off all by myself

in a village with just one family there

are no stores there are no hospitals

there’s no health care centers there is

nothing

my phone doesn’t work the village

doesn’t have electricity i don’t know

anyone

all i see is a family of three two goats

and a cow

and a yak i think it’s all this was my

introduction

to ladakh luckily for me and i say

luckily is

despite my illness i stopped to breathe

in the beauty of ladakh and i stopped to

look

and understand how is it that there is a

remote village so far away from a road

head

and that’s something i know so little

about being an indian i had no idea they

were villages like this

here is the beauty of this village in

this region

on that same trek i came across a school

this school had five children not in a

classroom mind you in the entire school

it had five children and two teachers of

which one of the teachers had

actually was on his way back to the main

town of lay

to buy midday meal supplies the school

was being reconstructed and painted for

just these five children

as most government schools are go this

it had a broken

blackboard it teaches two very shabby

looking rooms

bare floors and ladakh mind you goes

down to temperatures

very very low temperatures so let me

give you a little bit more about ladakh

ladakh like i said is a high altitude

regions region people

live in altitudes upwards of 9000 feet

let me give you something to compare it

with delhi gurgaon where i’m talking

from right now is

approximately 600 feet so you’re at an

altitude temperatures go down to minus

50 degrees in the winters

grass of the cargill region of ladakh is

arguably

the second most coldest region in the

entire planet

from the world over hundreds and

thousands of tourists come over to

ladakh

every year in fact the number of

tourists who come here

are more than the local population every

year there’s about 300 to 400 000

tourists to visit

do you know where they visit they visit

this beautiful lake called the pangong

lake which most of you would have seen

in the movies or on selfies and pictures

but here’s a little fact i bet you

didn’t know just beyond that beautiful

pangong lake are

few tiny little settlements hamlets

which have just a handful of homes there

is a little village there which is five

children

in its school there’s another one which

is 30 there is yet another one with 17

children

in the school i bet you didn’t know that

ladakh is home to the highest motorable

road people from the world overcome

there to click selfies but beyond that

more triple root

at few hundred a few hamlets almost 100

hamlets that are there which border

our two bordering neighbors china and

pakistan it is home

to the famous chardo trek which

trekkers come in from all over to come

and visit but did you know this part

it’s a trek for many for the outsiders

but for the it’s a lifeline

that’s the only way they travel to reach

their remote villages in winter

when the mountain passes are covered in

snow you and me enjoy winter out here

when we snuggled up in our blankets and

things come into our homes

many ladakhis are stuck in their

villages and do not come out for a few

months of a year because

in the winters the roads are shut there

is this is the other ladakh that most of

you don’t see

i was there for 21 days and during my

solo trek and the reality of ladakh hit

me what hit me was more was my sense of

shame that i knew

so little about a part of my own country

a background about me i come from a

corporate background i’m an

information technology professional i’ve

worked for many years in the us

came back quit to work with children i

was at the point of

that point of time in my life i was

teaching in a very

affluent private school here in gurgaon

the reality of the private school

and the facilities that my own children

have coming across a school with three

children

and five children blew my mind i came

back completely fired up with the

passion of wanting to do something i had

found my life’s purpose

but passion is one thing converting it

into a vision and a goal is something

entirely different

when i came back the first thing i did

was research

to understand why do i know so little

and what can i do to help what is the

reality the one thing that really amazed

me is

ladakh has 1 000 schools 1 000 schools

with an average

school strength of barely 25 children

and

education is today the single largest

reason for them to migrate that and job

opportunities

there is nothing out there to hold them

back in the villages barring a

government school

and they sometimes young children as

young as three or four years old go to

the cities to study and stay alone in

dormitories and hostels

most of these villages don’t have

electricity most of them still do not

have mobile connectivity but the people

want to stay there because that is their

home but their only aspiration is life

is better education for their children

and jobs for their children

this ladakh then became the one that i

said i want to change things or how can

i be

how can i help the one thing that

bothered me was if i don’t know anything

about this latak if i knew so little

chances are no one else does either so

my first thought

about building this passion into a

vision was

how do i make people aware of the real

ladakh how do i get people to go beyond

the tourism reasons

so if i thought that helped me was if i

were to put these villages and schools

on the map

google didn’t have information then can

i then

ask you to go to ladakh go to the real

villages and maybe contribute take a box

of crayons

take a football for a child take some

story books for them to read conduct a

reading workshop

so that’s the first thing we did i came

back

fired up and i quit my job and i started

this organization called 17 000 feet

foundation

as the name suggests i said i’m not

going to limit myself to ladakh

by the way this is the story of the most

of the indian himalayan region which is

another

10 states we started 17 000 feet

foundation along with my husband and our

third founding member who’s a ladakhi

with the simple reason how do we get

people to live better lives in their own

villages

first thing we did we mapped the entire

region of ladakh we visited 1 000

schools

it was beautiful to see that every

village had

every single child who went to school

there was not one single child who was

not going to school

and that’s such a beautiful thing to see

for me that made me want

do more for them i said how do i get

these children to stay back

and not travel outside so far away or

migrate

simple i said how can i work with the

parents perception that look your

government school is good

there is a system at work if every

single hamlet regardless of how small or

big

has a school it is a system that’s

trying to work so the best way we can

work is to support it

rather than create something in parallel

so we set about beautifying the schools

first things how do we make the schools

look better perform better

feel better so we started painting the

schools we provided carpeting we put up

playgrounds furniture

playgrounds do you have any idea how

difficult it is to set up a playground

in a remote villages which sometime

could take me three days of a walk to

reach

villages have to come out in full force

to help us not just this

do you know how difficult it is to set

up a playground in an area which is

mountainous

where you don’t have any electricity

villagers and our team members sit

together and break stones with their

bare hands

and this is the story of the ladakh

which is driven by a sense of community

of togetherness

that we started working we’ve set up

playgrounds now in over 140 schools and

this year we’ll be setting up 10 more

the playgrounds have attracted children

to the school like anything they want to

come there

they come there before the teachers come

in and they leave after the teachers

leave parents are pulling their children

out

of other schools and saying i want my

child to be here because the school is

looking beautiful

furniture do you know children sit on

the floor in minus 15 degrees centigrade

in delhi and gurgaon which faces some

sort of winters we shut the schools down

when it is 5 degrees

in ladakh schools continue up until

december when it is minus 15 degrees and

they shut for three months after

but the children go to school there are

regions in dhras where the snow

is at two feet three feet maybe even

four feet high

entire families move down for the winter

children actually go to in different

schools for six months and after the

snow melts which by the way could take

about a month

after the snow melts they come back to

their villages

i have pictures and visuals of children

studying

on in schools where this snow has

reached

two feet uh two floors two stories high

but they’re studying and they love

coming to school

this area we said how do we bring

digital education

so that’s another thing being a techie

myself a corporate techie

two years ago we even did this for us

reaching the last mile is not the

problem the problem is

reaching the last mile with the best

solution that is what we wanted to do we

waited eight years to get the perfect

solution

today we have also have a solution where

all of our schools are digitized they

have solar electricity

they have a unique offline solution

children are able to learn at home and

today during covet when

rest of the country most of the remote

areas children are sitting at home

our children have tablets in their hands

in their homes

we managed to do a whole lot for us

what has kept us going is the spirit of

the community in the sense of purpose

that they have

we managed to reduce migration most of

our children are back home now sitting

at home

going to the schools in their villages

and what keeps us going is the sense

of purpose that they gave us for us

ladakh has been a test bed

we call ourselves 17 000 feet foundation

and what we also do is we welcome people

like you to come in and be a part of our

program so next time you go to ladakh

don’t just go as a tourist you can go as

a volunteer tourist you can help us go

to this remote village

but if you go to that remote village

there you can contribute to the income

of that village

so next time you go anywhere look beyond

the tourism destination

maybe just maybe your life’s calling me

just be beyond there

thank you for listening i welcome you

all to ladakh someday the real ladakh

so as a ladakhi say july salaam alaikum

and namaste

you