Our Global Family Visit to Darjeeling

The first two photos are of a woman carrying a load of produce to sell and of the home of one of the students that MCC helps to support. The student's grandfather is standing by the door.












These four photos are of students at the Nepali Girls' Social Service Centre schools and daycare centers. Ruth and Ayesha are walking with the students in one photo.















































The above photos show the tea gardens, Ruth enjoying a cup of tea, the famous toy train, and a common flower arrangement. People in Darjeeling love their flowers.


Darjeeling is a town in the clouds surrounded by beautiful natural scenery. This former British hill station is 6,500 feet above sea level. Early this morning, I sat on the roof terrace of our simple hotel and watched the mist waft up the mountainsides covered with tea plantations. I got a glimpse of the Himalayan snow caps through a brief break in the clouds. I then walked back down to the dining room and ordered a set of delicious, world famous Darjeeling tea. But not all is idyllic in this hill station.

Ruth and I are here on an MCC Global Family program visit. Ayesha Kadar, the coordinator of the Global Family Program in India, has thoughtfully planned our visit during this time of year to give us a brief respite from the severe heat of Kolkata and the plains of India. Our visit quickly orients us to the raw social needs that lie immediately beneath the veneer of cool weather and beautiful scenery in Darjeeling.

The Nepali Girls’ Social Service Centre, supported by MCC, provides educational assistance to students from poor families, it has an open education program that helps high school dropouts complete their degrees, and it has three preschool daycare centers. They also provide basic healthcare education and small livelihood projects in communities where they have educational programs.

Our first day of visits focused on the daycare centers and families of students in nearby villages. They are tea plantation or rural agricultural laborers who earn about two dollars a day when they have work. Many have migrated here from regions of Nepal affected by the recent civil war in their county. The culture of Darjeeling is actually much closer to that of Nepal and Bhutan than the plains of India.

Students in the village of Aloobari performed a traditional Nepalese dance for us. Akriti Thami, one of the dancers, and her two siblings are the first in their family to go to school. A village woman with a tenth grade education helps at an after school study center, which was started by the Nepali Girls’ Social Service Centre. It is a resource for students whose illiterate parents are not able to help them do their homework.

On the second day we visited the homes of students in the town of Darjeeling. We climbed steep, narrow alleys and foot paths that cross open sewers and skirt piles of garbage thrown over the sides of embankments. Sapna Chhetri, a high school student, lives with her mother and brother. They support themselves by selling vegetables along the side of the road and doing domestic labor. Sapna dreams of going to college after completing high school. Ayesha Kadar, our Global Family coordinator, gives encouragement and practical advice as we sit in their tiny one-room space that is little more than a place to sleep and to stay dry when it rains.

Many girls drop out of school in their early teens to get married. Various children at the daycare centers are from such marriages. The fathers have abandoned their families. The young mothers take turns volunteering at the center by preparing a simple lunch for the children and doing other chores. A goal of the daycare center is to give the children a head start so they can do well when they enter the local primary school.

MCC helps support seventy students and their families through the Nepali Girl’s Social Service Centre. I’m grateful to not be an ordinary tourist as I walk the streets of Darjeeling where I’m constantly accosted by shopkeepers eager to make a sale or beggars asking for a handout. I am part of something more substantial that makes a significant difference in the lives of needy people in a way that gives them dignity and hope.

It’s a privilege to be part of a faith community whose social conscience and generosity supports this ministry. I try to weave this social service into the fabric of our Mennonite tradition of peace with justice. The proprietor of the hotel were we are staying is an older Tibetan woman, a follower of the Dalai Lama, who fled her homeland in the 1950s and started a new life in Darjeeling. She welcomes our presence because she appreciates what we’re doing for the community.

Ruth and I were talking with our Tibetan hostess on the terrace of the hotel early one morning. Part of the skyline is dominated by a huge building recently erected by a powerful local politician with an apparent edifice complex. (The purpose of the building, constructed on a former children’s playground, remains unclear.) A huge statue of a Gorkha soldier, gun in one hand and knife in the other, is astride a globe on the roof of the building.

Gorkhas from Nepal were recruited as soldiers by the British during the heyday of the British Empire and had reputations as fierce fighters. Other Gorkhas were recruited as tea pickers and laborers by the British East India Company after the king of Sikkim ceded Darjeeling to the Company in 1817. The Company began to plant tea on these slopes in its effort to wrest the tea trade away from China.

Our Tibetan hostess is clearly offended by the statue of a Gorkha soldier astride the world. She asks, “What presumption allows us to imagine such a thing?” I feel the pain of history in this region of the world. I also feel a kindred spirit with this Tibetan woman who had to flee her homeland as a young girl. My Anabaptist faith tradition, born in a sixteenth century history of religious suffering, gives me similar social sensitivities.