WASHINGTON — The Dalai Lama began the spiritual leg of a tour of the United States Thursday with a visit to a shelter for women in Washington, where he brought himself to the level of the residents by pointing out that he, too, was homeless.
“When I heard ‘homeless people’, my impression was that I myself, am also homeless,” the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet told a gathering of several hundred people in the conference room of N Street Shelter in Washington, where homeless and low-income women try to kick drug habits and reclaim their dignity.
“At 16, I lost my freedom. When my age 24, I lost my own country. Now I’m 72. So things are difficult but we never shake our hope or determination,” the Dalai Lama told the people gathered in the five-storey red brick building in downtown Washington, through which around 700 women pass each year.
The Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959 following a failed uprising against China, which nine years earlier had forcibly annexed his mountain homeland.
He has spent most of nearly five decades in exile in the northern Indian town of Dharamsala, and campaigning for Tibet to be designated a “zone of peace”, for Tibetans’ human and democratic rights, and for China to enter into talks on the future of the mountain land.
The Dalai Lama has complained in the past that the vast influx of ethnic Chinese into Tibet, and the industrialization of the mountainous region, is destroying the Tibetan culture and environment.
At N Street, in a speech laced with humor and compassion that left few eyes dry, the Dalai Lama only once mentioned China — when he spoke about development.
“Real transformation… is not to just develop big cities but also rural areas,” he said.
“In India, where I live, change must take place in rural areas. In China as well.
“We cannot call a country ‘developed’ when big cities here and there are developed but the countryside remains in a difficult situation,” he said.
Earlier this month, China ordered 100,000 ethnic Tibetans to give up their traditional nomadic lives and settle in towns, saying their way of life is threatening the environment, the Chinese state press reported.
The Dalai Lama praised N Street for its innovative programs, which include bringing together residents with abandoned animals in Humane Society shelters, and weekly meditation sessions run by a Buddhist nun.
“Your work is very important and very long-sighted,” he said, referring in particular to the program under which women volunteer at the local animal shelter.
“Eventually, we need some kind of worldwide movement for more vegetarianism, to check those beef farms, poultry farms, fisheries and shrimp,” he said.
“One plate of shrimp, too many lives,” said the Buddhist spiritual leader — who says in his autobiography that he is not vegetarian — drawing another round of applause and laughter from the crowd.
Shatavia Young, who is trying to kick, once and for all, an addiction to drugs and alcohol that began when she was 12, in one of the N Street residents who volunteer once a week at Washington DC animal shelters.
“When I was using, I wasn’t going to take care of no animals or do no meditation,” Shatavia, who has been at N Street since July, told AFP.
“But this has made a difference. I look at those dogs, so hurt, so beaten, and sometimes you almost think they’re human, calling for help. Just like I called for help and found myself here.
“I mostly play with them and train them, too, and it makes me feel good to give them something and have it given back,” said the ebullient 22-year-old.
Like many of the other women, Shatavia had prepared a welcome speech for the Dalai Lama, but when she met him face to face, she spoke spontaneously.
“I told him, ‘Thank you for coming into my home’, because this is my home for now,” she said.
