RAJPUR - The House of Peace

Thousands of feet in the hills above the Indian planes, groups of Tibetan refugees are quietly carving a life out for themselves. Having been exiled from their homeland in the late fifties by the Chinese, two generations of youth have been scraping livings to various degrees of success and quietly planning their vengance against the Chinese. Stephan Hishey and his family, ex Tibet themselves and educated in Detroit of all places, decided seven years ago to reach out to this disenfranchised area of society by setting up the House of Peace. Rajpur and the other towns in this area have a massive Tibetan population, about three thousand (the hills have about fifteen thousand Indians) and Stephan's charity seeks to give the youth some formal schooling, skills and teaches them reconciliation, rather than anger, against their Chinese oppression.


Gardening with the boys from Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan. Lots of weeding after a few months of non manual labour plays havoc with one's beautiful fingers.

A pretty darn good NGO, then, which benefits from plenty of foreign funding (Tibet's plight is one of those which the Western world is pretty aware of. Must be the influence of Richard Gere. And, y'know, the Dalai Lama.) and one we'll be working with for a few short weeks. The Himilayan foothills remind me a lot of Lantau Peak back on Hong Kong island. They are much more developed, though and, thus, instead of staying in one of the shanty towns like most of the refugees we are in a guesthouse which seems to have been built to resemble small town America. Window seats, rocking chairs, a healthy stock of Robert Ludlum on the bookshelves... Jessica Fletcher could be here, twiddling her specs and shaking her head wearily at the young kids who occassionally run past the windows on their way up and down the hills. She'd also have appreciated the house's spooky qualities. We're close to monsoon season and, at night, the lights dramatically extinguish and we're treated to a Hollywood style thunder and lightning storm of epic proportions. We wouldn't mind, but the satelite TV stops working as well. Which is a real shame when you're in the middle of X-Men and enjoying it immensly.

Err... Did I mention I was in an isolated area of hills? Okay, we'll call it semi isolated.


Feet in the Gangees at Rishikesh; spiritual centre for Hindus and Buddhists alike and the inspiration for all that funky sitar work the Beatles briefly got into. Beautiful river. Bit grey, though.