Tibetan scarves and their meaning

Perhaps our readers have been wondering why the sponsors of our literacy project are wearing those beautiful yellow scarves in the photos. If you remember, most of our current WLP students belong to the Buddhist community of Gulabgarh and these silk scarves are an important part of their tradition. We'd like to explain why.

Bestowing a Khata or silk scarf, is an ancient Tibetan buddhist tradition that is still honored today. The Khata is offered as an auspicious symbol of good intentions during the welcoming and initiation of new relationships. In fact, they are presented as blessings to all types of new relationships and during events such as religious and political ceremonies, marriages, births, funeral ceremonies, and on any occasion that a person considers worthy of its bestowal. We chose to present our supporters with a Khata as a sign of our deepest respect and gratitude.

The offering of a Khata often marks a powerful change and transition in a person’s life. It is an honor for a person to be presented with this genuine act of blessing and good will.

Khatas are bestowed on images of Buddha, spiritual teachers and objects of devotion as a sign of respect and gratitude and so it is very common for people to hang white silk scarves over altars and around the sacred objects that are placed there. They are also considered to bring good luck. In addition, you will often see them flown and put on prayer flags. It's a wonderful feeling when you receive a Khata as you reach the top of a high mountain pass!

The traditional scarves are usually made of white or ivory colored silk with symbols or mantras either inscribed or woven into the fabric. Cotton as well as other fabrics are used to create Khatas and they are available in a variety of colors including blue, red, green and yellow or gold.

On a curious note, while President Obama was being sworn in as President of the United States, he was carrying a white silk scarf, or khata, blessed by H.H. the Dalai Lama, in his pocket.

Sources:
http://EzineArticles.com/3167725
http://www.tibetanprayerflag.com/products.php?cat=5 

World Press Freedom Day

Today, May 3rd, is World Press Freedom Day. To mark this day, the WLP would like to share the following thought with its readers: "...media freedom plays a crucial role in the transformation of society by reshaping its political, economic and social aspects."

As members of a project that strives to achieve women's literacy in a country beset by illiteracy, we cannot afford to ignore the role of media literacy.  

What, you may ask is media literacy, also referred to as information literacy? According to the source cited below, "Being media literate is being able to think critically and to evaluate and analyze news and information; it is knowing how to access media from a variety of sources; and, it is being capable of conveying information through different media. It is the foundation of communications in a media driven society." Therefore, "media awareness is just as important for the students of today as understanding history and mathematics."

 Read more at Suite101: Resources for Teaching Media Literacy: Teacher Resources for Bringing Media Awareness into the Classroom | Suite101.com http://brennacoleman.suite101.com/resources-for-teaching-media-literacy-a185068#ixzz1toW6h3GW

The women of Gulabgarh--our students--must strive towards literacy and numeracy, but this is only the first step.  Once these women are literate, they must be prepared to continue learning, to climb other equally important steps toward their own empowerment and one of them is to become media literate.

 

A new portrait, another note of thanks

Today we would like to introduce you to Isabel, another of our highly esteemed sponsors. Isabel is a hard-working woman from Galicia, Spain, who believes in helping the illiterate women of Gulabgarh--women she has never met, but whom she understands. She feels empathy for and identifies with the women of a village that is so far away from her own because she shares their personal struggle to succeed in life, to help raise a family and to participate in the responsibilities and the decisions of her household. Isabel is a woman we cherish and admire.

A true fighter, Isabel has come up in the world through her own determination and desire to learn and improve. She has acquired the knowhow and wisdom that come from study and experience and used them to improve her education and her life. Because Isabel is aware of the importance of lifelong learning, she continues to harness and broaden this knowledge. Indeed, at present she is preparing state exams to compete for a job in the health services. For us she is an example of courage, fortitude and optimism.

Thank you, Isabel, for believing in the WLP and for helping us to work toward empowering the women of Gulabgarh through the Women's Literacy Project.

Empowering women: IKEA partners with the UNDP

Recently, on the WLP Facebook page, we posted some important news for the rural women of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populated and least developed state: An important partnership between IKEA and the United Nations Development Programme may bring new hope to the women of the region.

For other, more isolated rural areas of India such as Paddar, small-scale efforts like the Women's Literacy Project of Gulabgarh are also working to empower women, so that they become key proactive members of their community.

There is still so much to be done in this emerging economy to help build women's skills, confidence, self-reliance and yes, even their financial literacy, that every initiative counts. Our project has begun preparing the ground toward empowerment by teaching our students the basic skills of reading, writing and numeracy.

Below is the article we published in Technorati with more information regarding this recent development.

Article first published as Empowering Women: IKEA Joins Efforts With UNDP on Technorati.

"Empowered lives. Resilient nations." The heading on the homepage of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) website is inspiring a new effort designed to benefit the rural women of India. With a focus on empowering women, the UNDP has partnered with IKEA Foundation in a project that aims to help build the self-reliance and financial skills of over 50,000 women in 500 villages in three districts of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populated (almost 200 m) but least developed state.
The partnership programme, to which IKEA has pledged €30 million, aims to promote this target group's financial literacy, thereby "strengthening their technical, institutional, managerial and financial skills so that they are able to play a larger role in the social and economic development in the villages."
Including rural women in its undertakings is an apparent attempt to broaden IKEA Foundation’s mission, until now focused mainly on helping the children of developing countries.

Read more: http://technorati.com/business/article/empowering-women-ikea-joins-efforts-with/#ixzz1sljf5s2q

Earth Day 2012: the WLP's pledge

The WLP Gulabgarh has made a pledge for Earth Day 2012 (Sunday, 22 April).

We dedicate this day to the students of the Women's Literacy Project, who are working so hard to become literate. These women, who are also striving to become proactive members of their community, will soon be able to make their own pledges and organize their own awareness campaigns about Earth Day. So today, we're focusing on environmental literacy.

Here are some interesting facts about why Earth Day Network created WAGE® (Women and the Green Economy):
    •    Women constitute more than half of the world’s population
    •    Women make 85 percent of all consumer choices
    •    Women are rising to key positions of power
    •    Women can lead the way to a sustainable green economy

Importance of Inner Values

The Dalai Lama addresses his audience on the importance of

the inner values of love, compassion and forgiveness.

Below are some extracts of his speech that relate to the ideas that are behind the WLP's mission: concern for others and the meaning of community.

"Money, power alone cannot bring together human beings. A sense of concern of others' well-being: that mental attitude alone brings us together."

"Each individual's future entirely depends on the rest of the humanity. No matter how powerful one single person is, but their future… is entirely dependent on the community."

Ladakhi sounds like this

We thought it worthwhile to dedicate a post to Ladakhi because many of the WLP students belong to the Ladakhi nation and speak one of more varieties of the language. Of course, in the WLP school, the women are learning "only" Hindi and English script, at least for now. On the other hand, children who attend the Himalyan Buddhist School (H.C.S.) in Gulabgarh also learn Bhoti, in addition to Hindi and English. How lucky they are to know so many languages!

Festival in Leh. Photo by Raul

But what is Ladakhi and where does this language come from? To answer this question, we've decided to share the information about Ladakhi contained in the Wikipedia; we couldn't have done a better job ourselves.

"The Ladakhi language (Tibetan: ལ་དྭགས་སྐད་, Wylie: La-dwags skad), now also called Bhoti, is the predominant language in the Ladakh region of the Jammu and Kashmir state of India, and is also spoken in Baltistan. Ladakhi is closely related to Tibetan, and the Ladakhi people share cultural similarities with Tibetans, including Tibetan Buddhism. 

Ladakhi has approximately 200,000 speakers in India, and perhaps 12,000 speakers in the Tibet region of China, mostly in the Changthang region. The language has several dialects including Ladakhi proper (also called Lehskat after the capital of Ladakh, Leh, where it is spoken), Shamskat, spoken to the northwest of Leh, Stotskat, spoken to the southeast in the Indus valley and Nubra, spoken in the north. The varieties spoken in Upper Ladakh and Zangskar have many features of Ladakhi and many other features of western dialects of Central Tibetan.

Ladakhi is usually written using Tibetan script with the pronunciation of Ladakhi being much closer to written Tibetan than most other Tibetan dialects."

In case you'd like to know what Ladakhi sounds like—at least a few consonant sounds from the language—we've included the short Keynote presentation below.