The neighborhood association The Tibetan community in Santa Fe

Monday through Friday, Tashi Gyalkhar is a staff manager in the state of New Mexico’s Human Services Department. The fast-talking thirty-six-yearold spends Saturday mornings as an assistant teacher at the Tibetan Association of Santa Fe, helping children learn the Tibetan alphabet. Gyalkhar immigrated to Santa Fe from Dharamshala, India, when she was sixteen years old, as part of a resettlement project of 1,000 Tibetans that began in the early 1990s. Her mother came first, among the first couple of dozen Tibetans to move to Santa Fe, and Gyalkhar followed with her father and older brother a few years later.

“In each city, there was an American community helping out. Here in Santa Fe, [the sponsor program] was started by Project Tibet,” she said. “People got to choose where they wanted to go. Everyone who came to Santa Fe chose it.”

Gyalkhar, who spent her junior and senior years at Capital High School, remembers well how intimidating it can be to feel confident speaking a new language. She has some tricks up her sleeve for her students who are learning Tibetan. “Read out loud,” she said. “And if you’re at home, go into the bathroom so you have the echo, which allows you to hear much better where you’re going wrong with your pronunciation.”

Tibetans have been living in exile since 1959, when the Dalai Lama fled Tibet for India. He was followed out of the isolated country in the Himalayas by 100,000 Tibetan Buddhists. They were rising up against nearly a decade of Communist Chinese repression that was destroying the Tibetan culture. Tibetans, even those born in the country, are not allowed to become citizens of India unless they renounce their affiliation with the central Tibetan government in exile. Coming to the United States