Cooking Up Support
Drolma Gadou brings 400 solar cookers and more to support her Tibetan community.

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This article was published in Abroad View's fall 2009 magazine.

Drolma Gadou (first from left) conducted solar cooker usage interviews with rural Tibetans as part of an independent project supported by DukeEngage, a program that empowers students to address critical human needs in the United States and abroad through immersive service.

By Asha Toulmin

Study abroad isn’t just a chance to make an impact in another country: for Drolma Gadou, studying abroad is her chance to make an impact at home. To Gadou, home is the rural community in Tibet where she was born and raised—and where she learned the value of compassion and giving.

“Living in this traditional environment embedded beliefs, concepts, and Tibetan culture in my mind,” Gadou says. “I learned to be responsible for people around me through my interdependent relationships with Tibetan people in the community and also as a daily witness to poverty’s influence upon people.”

Gadou first started getting involved in community development in 2002, when she joined a program for teaching English in her Tibetan village. American mentors staffed the program, and Gadou helped with one outgrowth of the program: a small-scale solar cooker project. The local Tibetan people who received solar cookers reported that they brought many benefits to their lives, like helping them save fuel, reducing indoor pollution, and lessening the burden on women of collecting fuel.

Gadou’s mentors went on to encourage her continued involvement in community development in Tibet. The educational opportunities her mentors provided eventually made Gadou the most educated person in her village. As her education progressed, Gadou became increasingly motivated to help her community.

A woman fetching water from the ditch Gadou built in 2007 and which was sponsored by the Shambala Connection.

“The more involved I am,” she says, “the more I feel the need to pursue more knowledge and further education in order to gain more in-depth insights about Tibetan communities and finding solutions to address the problems.”

Gadou is now a sophomore international student at Duke University, and she has developed a significant number of other projects within Tibet. In 2008, she received a Davis Projects for Peace grant worth $10,000, which she used to purchase 400 solar cookers for rural Tibetan households. This past summer, Duke’s Global Health Institute gave Gadou funding for a training project addressing health care problems in rural Tibetan areas. She also volunteers her translation skills for Machik, an organization helping Tibetans create new pathways forward as communities on the Tibetan plateau approach uncertain times.

In the past few years, Gadou has carried out various projects, including distributing solar cookers, volunteer teaching, and projects focusing on environmental protection, clean water, health care training, and cultural preservation. “Through these projects, I have had the opportunity to visit many rural villages. This has helped me understand more about poverty; for example, how it limits access to education, health care, basic needs, and produces dilemmas in people’s lives,” she says.

Solar cookers were distributed to individual families; shown here are recipients taking their own solar cookers by wooden cart. This solar cooker project took place in 2008 and was sponsored by the Davis Project for Peace in 2008.

Even though she is away from her Tibetan family and friends, Gadou’s motivation does not waiver. She keeps her community in mind and tries to connect with her roots as often as she can, staying in contact with the locals and attempting to return each summer with a community development project.

Gadou has had considerable success in getting support for her projects, but there are still obstacles to the kind of progress she wants to see. “I am often overwhelmed by the problems in my community, such as bad health, poverty, and poor education,” she says. “I don’t know how to prioritize certain projects among the huge mess. Neither do I know where to look for funding for projects.”

But one resource Gadou does have is an understanding of the cultural climate of the work she is doing. As a member of the community, she has insight that many outsiders and American volunteers trying to help cannot parallel. “Many people in my community have constrained knowledge about the outside world because of landlocked geographic nature. Even though we may often resist and reject changes in our life, we are forced to make changes,” she says. “I want to seize every possibility in my life to improve their life quality.”

And even if the path isn’t always an easy one, Gadou knows that, in the end, her efforts are worthwhile. “It is an arduous process to work on a proposal and get things done, put together all the resources, and finally make a difference,” she says. “I feel it is worth the efforts and is a meaningful life I am leading. I consider making a difference and doing development projects essentially important for me and for those people in need.”