Our Himalayan Adventure Part VI: SECMOL

While David, Matt, and Minette explored the hidden valleys of Ladakh, Jayashree visited the campus of SECMOL (Students' Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh). SECMOL is scenically located on a hill descending into the north bank of the Indus, close to the lush green Phey village. The campus is about 10 km from Leh, southward off the Leh-Kargil highway, down a lonely, winding 3 km road. Travelling down this nowhere-road, the first view of SECMOL comes as a pleasing surprise. This one is a closer view.

The SECMOL buildings use passive solar architecture: first, they face south and so get the sun all through the year. Their traditional Ladakhi thick rammed-mud walls have high thermal capacity, while the rear end of the buildings push into the hillside so that the temperature inside does not fall below the soil temperature. Aesthetically painted black bands absorb the sun's heat while in winter the slanted frames hold polythene sheets to produce greenhouse heating.



A view from the kitchen roof - at ground level - showing the concave mirror array used to boil water and roast barley. The electricity on campus comes from solar batteries (not shown here).









Jayashree with SECMOL volunteers Sujatha, Karen and Vinitha.









Jayashree with Karen and Alex. The next is a view from the hill behind them.









View of the Indus, looking east



Now something about the work done at SECMOL, which is led by Sonam Wangchuk and his American-born wife, Rebecca (Becky) Norman:

School children in Ladakh are up against tremendous odds, the major one being language. Most people speak and write Ladakhi (a dialect of Tibetan with its own script), but for years, as a legacy of the Dogra rule, the primary schools used Urdu as the medium of instruction, while another strong lobby pressed for the formal Tibetan language that is used for religious purposes. As an uneasy compromise, the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council (formed in 1995) decided to adopt English. Adding to this alienation the textbooks, written for tropical India, go on incomprehensibly about elephants, mangoes and trains, to kids who know only yaks, apricots and snow. The result is tragic: 90-95% of the children fail the school-leaving exam.

SECMOL runs a residential program for about 50 such children every year to tutor them to re-appear for this exam. Other programs include teacher education, youth camps and training of Village Education Committee members. This work is done in large part by students and other volunteers who spend weeks or months there. SECMOL is also writing culturally appropriate language and science books for the primary schools of Ladakh (Jayashree contributed her modest bit here).

Address: Students' Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) P.O. Box 4, 194101 Leh, Ladakh, India. Phones: Leh Office:- Tel - 91-1982-252421 Fax - 91-1982-253561 Phey Campus:- Tel - 91-1982-226115 91-1982-226120

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