North American Tibetan Cultural Immersion Camp
Thursday, 29 June 2006, 10:00 AM
New York: For 10 days in July the 108-acre premises of the Tibetan Culture Centre in Bloomington, Indiana, will host a group of interested Tibetan high school students from different parts of North America for the North American Tibetan Cultural Immersion Camp.
Scheduled to be held from 21 to 31 July, the North American Tibetan Cultural Immersion Camp is a joint initiative of the Office of Tibet in New York and the Tibetan Culture Centre in Bloomington.
The camp will provide participants with the opportunity to immerse themselves completely in the Tibetan cultural environment and thus learn about themselves.
It is the hope of the organizers that the camp will spark the children’s interest in their culture and thus serve a catalyst for a journey which will take them to their roots and identity.
During the ten-day programme, the participants will engage in a series of group activities to explore their parents’ birth places, family altars and the significance of images and objects on the altar. The participants will learn about Tibetan traditional clothes and engage in an exercise to identify the difference in the clothes worn in different parts of Tibet.
They will learn also about Tibetan festivals, cuisines, iconography, including rituals arts and crafts, structure of the Tibetan language, and the essence of Tibetan culture and Buddhism.
In each group activity, the participants will be carefully guided by a facilitator who is expert on the subject.
In order to give participants adequate background information on Tibet and its culture, experts will be invited to speak on the situation inside Tibet, the exile community and the students’ political activism. Similarly, a series of video films on Tibet will be screened during the camp.
Every day, some time will be set aside for participants to learn Tibetan songs or dance or the most popular instrument, /dra-nyen /(six-stringed Tibetan lute).
The Office of Tibet and the Tibetan Culture Centre will bear the major cost of the camp and the participants to the camp are required only to make their own travel arrangement to and from Bloomington, Indiana, and pay a registration fee of US $100.
Report sent by the Liaison Office, Latin America, New York
(www.tibet.net is the official website of the Central Tibetan Administration.)