TEAM Celebrated A Twin Event With School Children

Dharamsala, 7 June 2008: Tesi Environmental Awareness Movement (TEAM) organised a four-day workshop from 4-7 June to promote Environmental Awareness among the Tibetan school children. Thirty-three 8th grade students from Tibetan Children's Village (TCV) Schools in Upper Dharamsala, Lower Dharamsala and Gopalpur attended the workshop held at the College for Higher Tibetan Studies in Sarah, Himachal Pradesh.

On the second day, 5 June, the participants celebrated the twin event of TEAM's 3rd Founding Anniversary and the World Environment Day with prayers; lighting of 108 butter lamps for Mother Nature and everyone was served with ceremonial rice and Tibetan tea. On the occasion TEAM honoured Mrs. Tenzin Pelmo, an English teacher at the TCV's Teachers' Training School, with 2008 Tesi Environmental Service Award (TESA) for her genuine effort to promote environmental awareness among our people especially the teachers. TESA, a certificate and a cash of Rs. 5000, is given each year to a Tibetan who has sincerely contributed towards promoting environmental awareness in our community. During the ceremony, TEAM also awarded cash prize for four students from the Suja TCV School who composed the best essays on Global Warming (Fire theme) for TEAM's 2008 Lungta Essay Competition. After the morning ceremony, the workshop continued with activities such as Council of All Beings and Web-of-life.

The students took the workshop, which began each day at 7 am with yoga and meditation and the ended around 9 pm, very seriously. The sessions included Earth, earthlings, us and our ecological-self; Interdependent nature of all life forms and the importance of biodiversity conservation; Introduction to the current global environmental problems; Review our lives, reflect on our gifts, and clarify our intentions for taking part in rebuilding a sustainable community; Looking at Tibet: Current Environmental Reality; Environmental careers; Solo-walk in nature; Story-telling and songs, and screening of the movie Keke -Xili: Mountain Petrol.

The workshop resource persons were all TEAM members: Mr. Tashi Tsering, a PhD student at the University of British Columbia; Mr. Tsering Dorjee, a staff of the Wildlife Trust of India, and the TEAM staff include Mr. Ugyen Tsephel, Ven. Youngdung Nyima, Mrs. Tashi Lhamo, and Mrs. Tsering Yangkey.

In their final evaluation 55 % of the students said the workshop duration was too short and 100% said they would strongly recommend this workshop to others. And to our delight, all the students (100%) appreciated the workshop content as they learned a lot from the four-day experience.

TEAM is a non-profit environmental organization with a mission to revive the ecological consciousness of the Tibetan people.