The youthful sister of the Tibetan Buddhist non secular chief the Dalai Lama has acquired a prestigious college award for her lifelong dedication to educating Tibetan youngsters who stay in exile.
Jetsun Pema, 84, acquired the Pearl S. Buck Award, with a medallion and a money prize of US$25,000, from Randolph Faculty in Lynchburg, Virginia, on Thursday.
Pema, revered by Tibetans as “Amala,” or “Revered Mom,” has constructed one of the profitable Tibetan academic establishments overseas — the Tibetan Kids’s Villages, or TCV. The nonprofit group cares for and educates orphaned, destitute and refugee youngsters from Tibet. Its primary facility is in Dharamsala in northern India.
She is the primary Tibetan to obtain the award given to girls who exemplify the beliefs, values and commitments of author and novelist Pearl S. Buck, the primary American lady to obtain the Nobel Prize for Literature and a champion of girls’s and youngsters’s rights.
“We had some wonderful nominations, and when the nominations for Jetsun Pema got here via, it simply felt like that is [someone] who exemplifies Pearl Buck and her commitments to individuals of Asia and the kids, and her dedication to training,” school president Sue Ott Rowlands advised Radio Free Asia.
Pema was additionally the first lady elected to a ministerial publish within the Tibetan parliament-in-exile, serving as minister for training.
Formally acknowledged by the Tibetan parliament-in-exile because the “Mom of Tibet,” Pema labored at TCV for over 5 a long time.
She served as president of TCV from 1964 to 2006 and was instrumental in main the enlargement of colleges throughout India and in caring for and educating over 53,000 Tibetan youngsters who had escaped Tibet and had been separated from their households, or who had been orphaned or from underprivileged households.
After she retired in August 2006, Pema continued to work on numerous youngsters’s training tasks, together with the Dalai Lama Institute for Increased Training in Bangalore, India.
“This award acknowledges the efforts of not solely myself however everybody who has contributed to this trigger, ranging from my late elder sister together with many others who’ve devoted their lives to the training of Tibetan youngsters,” Pema advised RFA Tibetan in an interview.
Illustrious listing
Earlier award winners embody former Irish President Mary Robinson, Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, former First Girl of Egypt Jehan Sadat, former Philippines President Corazon Aquino, U.S. architect, designer and sculptor Maya Lin, and American creator Maxine Hong Kingston.
Pema mentioned she would donate her award cash to TCV.
“The training we’ve got given to our younger individuals has benefited them tremendously and has empowered them … and that’s encouraging,” Pema mentioned, addressing a gathering of a number of hundred individuals, together with former college students and Tibetans who had traveled from different components of the nation to be on the award ceremony.
On the occasion, Pema spoke concerning the mandate she acquired from the Dalai Lama to make sure Tibetan youngsters acquired a very good training and care when she took over the work initiated by her late sister, Tsering Dolma Takla.
Takla, the elder sister of the Dalai Lama, first volunteered in Could 1960 to look after over 50 Tibetan youngsters whose mother and father had been working in highway development camps in north India, making a nursery house for them, which later expanded right into a collection of over 15 TCV colleges throughout India beneath Pema’s management.
Pema has acquired a number of international honors, together with the World’s Kids’s Prize for the Rights of the Youngster in Sweden in 2006, the Maria Montessori Award in Italy in 2010, and a UNESCO Medal in 1999.
She additionally acquired the esteemed Nari Shakti Puraskar award in 2018 from the Indian authorities, which acknowledges girls or establishments devoted to advancing girls’s empowerment.
Translated by Tenzin Dickyi with extra reporting by Passang Dhonden for RFA Tibetan. Edited by Tenzin Pema for RFA Tibetan, and by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
