The beginning
When the hostel was started a classroom had to serve as accommodation for the children during the night. You might be wondering where one could find space for a hostel with a capacity of nowadays 100 children. Thus we are going to reveal it to you:
The school was built on a slope. Thus when the big play ground was built, which was kept on the same level as the school buildings a lot of space would have remained unused underneath it. Not willing to leave this space unused and because the hostel needed more space anyways, a whole three-floor building was set up underneath the playground. One of the floors is now used for the hostel.
The idea
The basic idea of the hostel is to help parents who work in the hosiery business. During wintertime those parents travel towards the South of India to sell their products. Logically their children either miss their education if they go with their parents or they remain with neither home nor parents in this time. Parents who have this kind of problem can now send their children to this hostel for a monthly fee. Some children also come for a different reason. If parents live in a town or village where there is no Tibetan school they sometimes send their children to stay in the hostel all year around and attend one of the Tibetan schools here in around Dharamsala.
The routine
For the monthly fee the children get breakfast, lunch and diner every day. They also get accommodation of course and, may be most importantly, they always have someone who looks after them, the hostel mother. She is the one who cooks for the children helps them washing their clothes is looking for their health and their schoolwork and in some cases she certainly needs to kind of replace the mother for the 5 to 14 years old children.
In the evening you can hear the children when their Tibetan writing and reading class starts. This is another special of the hostel, to provide an extra education for the children where they need it. But the time with no extra lesson the school playing ground is transformed into a living and playing room for all the hostel kids.
Though non-Tibetan children also live in the hostel they all visit Tibetan schools weather it is the upper TCV, the TCV Day School in McLeod Ganj or the Yongling Crèche & Kindergarten.
