Tenzin
About Tenzin:
Hi, I am Tenzin. I am a Tibetan girl and 18 years old. I was born in India as a refugee and did my schooling in Upper Tibetan children village school. Under the grace of our leader, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, I got selected for the scholarship given by Pestalozzi International Village trust to study in England. Recently, our village coordinator passed this photo contest proposal and I decided to take part in it. I was really attracted by the concept behind the contest. With accord to my experiences with photos and pictures, I have sensed the underlying asset of a picture is in its ability to interact with people. In a way, it talks a lot about the photographer as well.
As CHANGEit aims to bring in campaigning pictures taken by youth, I immediately took the golden chance for to convey the truth behind my refuge in exile through my picture. Personally, I found this as a very good way of creating awareness about issue of Tibet among foreign youngsters. I took this photo when I was in India and thirteen years old. It is one of the first photos that I have taken in my journey of photography and holds an invaluable meaning for me.
About Tenzin’s photo:
In this picture, an infant Tibetan girl has a bucket behind on her back taking it to the common kitchen to get supper for her home mates. I haven’t taken it to symbolise any sort of child labour or to show a little girl being bullied. This girl symbolises every Tibetan students studying in India in exile. In my school, children come from Tibet to seek refuge in India and our school is the first refugee school founded for Tibetan children. I also went to that school when I was six years old and I have also gone through the same stage like her. I remember that there used to be rotas for every chores and I had to do the home chores when my turn comes. I used to dread all those chores and used to find it too big for me to handle but today, I really feel grateful to my school that it let me go through all those experiences when I was little. Today, I am in England and far away from my home. The village I am living in has got students from all the developing countries and culture exchange is another purpose to bring students from different countries. Here, self reliant is one of the principles held up and every thing has to be done by you. At such times, the experiences of the hardship that I went back in my school are helping a lot in various ways. Today I can understand the true essence behind hardships that can bear fruitful consequences. In all, I can call those days the preparation for our today and future.
