Be happy to give joy

A cheerfull day of games can bring welth and sustenance on the other side of the world

I look back at the photos and I remember the sultry heat of that Sunday. We tried two weeks before but a storm stopped us. Finally, the ‘Let’s help and have fun’ event was happening. A place in the countryside near Bergamo, Italy, a certain group of people for whom doing good means feeling good. An email among already established and to new friends. Well over 100 adults with many, many children arrived : the party started.

I look back at the photos and I remember that I met Stefano, the event organiser, many years ago. Our paths crossed many times: we always talked about common interests, mainly photography and cinema, until at some point I discovered that he ”dropped everything”, that he left his job. He now teaches yoga and once a year goes to volunteer at a school in Nepal. It is clear to me that since then his life changed, that his smile also changed. More open and deeper, like the reflection of a more intense inner light.

Once again, I look back at the photos and remember moments of that day. I think that doing good is to establish ties. To create a moment where everyone brings what they might have, time, space, experience, skills, and share it, put it in the middle, see it multiply rather than disappear. I think about the children who had fun with giant soap bubbles, enchanted by the story of Odysseus wandering in the Mediterranean with Ithaca in his heart, refreshed by a dip in the pool, moved by the story of children far away from them and yet identical to them. I think about the grown-ups who cooked, who designed and sold T-shirts, who bought them, who sat under the trees with a cool drink.

I look back at the photos and the faces of the children of the Tashi Orphan School that I met a month after I took the photos. And I think that if I had just put some money for them in a box, I would not gone to Kathmandu to meet them. I went to met them them because a network of relationships, meetings, things that fitted together and that happened by chance, my desire and will to go. And when I got to the destination, I found that my charitable act was nothing compared to what I was receiving back from those boys and girls, young men and women who live with dignity in a district that was almost spared by the earthquake but in a poverty that we, born at the right time and in a more fortunate part of the world, cannot even imagine. And perhaps we cannot longer even imagine the purity of their feelings, the unconditional trust given to those who come to Kathmandu to help them.

I look back at the photos and what emerges, and perhaps at long last gives meaning to what I have tried to express with my words, is a sentence by Christopher McCandless, the American traveler who died tragically and whose story inspired the film ‘Into the Wild’. “Happiness is only real when shared”

The Tashi Orphan School is in Kathmandu, Nepal.

To help preserve the Tibetan culture and traditions and to give an education to young and teenage girls and boys,

the Tibetan master Lama Tashi founded the Tibetan Cultural Association and the Tashi Orphan School.

Visit www.culturaletibetana.org to support the cause.