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Feeding the monks of Sera Mey
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Stefania Moretti, CTV.ca News
Date: Saturday Sep. 26, 2009 6:06 PM ET
On the eve of the Dalai Lama's visit to Canada, a Canadian man shares his photos and story of work to help exiled Tibetan monks at the Sera Mey monastery in India. Last winter he met the Dalai Lama as he delivered a huge food shipment and learned more about the teachings of the dharma.
In 2008, a routine visit to a local Tibetan cultural centre turned into the journey of a lifetime for Fitzsimons, a practicing Buddhist since the age of 15. There, Fitzsimons met his guru Khensur Rinpoche Lobsang Jamyang, retired Abbot of the Sera Mey Monastic University for Tibetan Buddhist monks and their principal food provider.
Touched by his guru's desperate need for help to feed the 1,300 monks, as well as the hundreds of children and orphans living in exile at the monastery in Bylakuppe, India, Fitzsimons became a regular contributor to the Sera Mey Fund. He learned the majority of the monks living at Sera Mey were often forced to abandon the monastery and their studies and fend for themselves on the streets, offering prayers and dharma teachings (word of Buddha) in return for morsels of food and modest donations.
Last winter Fitzsimons decided to rally his wealthy industry friends in Toronto and Los Angeles. He sold one of his design projects, a luxury trailer, and raised enough money to purchase a substantial food inventory for the monastery.
"I knew I had to do more, to take it to the next step," Fitzsimons said. But before he hit-up his peers for money, a friend suggested he check out the situation at Sera Mey for himself.
"That sort of stuck with me," Fitzsimons said.
So he bought two plane tickets for India and visited Sera Mey with his sister, Leslie.
"It's a big step to get up and go to India for the first time," he said.
Once he arrived at Sera Mey, he saw first-hand how dire the situation was. "By the time I got there, there were only about 25 bags of rice left on the shelves," he said.
When the price of rice skyrocketed in 2008 and global economy took a drastic turn for the worse, the donations the monks rely on started to dwindle, before nearly stopping entirely.
"And this was right across the board for monasteries in India, not just Sera Mey," Fitzsimons said.
Each monk at Sera Mey lives off about $1 per day, and that includes everything food to daily necessities, Fitzsimons estimated.
As it turned out, Fitzsimons' housekeeper Gheeta Ghosh had a son, Marc, a deejay, who lived in Bangalore. Together they compiled a list of daily food stuffs the monks would need, calculated what would amount to a least three months worth, and co-ordinated trucks for delivery to Sera Mey.
In February of 2009, cash-in-hand, the Fitzsimons and the Ghoshes met in India.
There, Fitzsimons purchased roughly 40,000 kilograms of food including rice, potatoes, garlic, onions, salt, turmeric, fruits and vegetables from several dusty outdoor Bangalore wholesale food markets.
After loading the trucks, Fitzsimons and the others made the six-hour road trip to Sera Mey.
"We made a big to-do, when we arrived. That's for sure," Fitzsimons said.
The monks hadn't had any vegetables to eat for eights months, and were living off of rice and dahl (a legume) exclusively.
And when Fitzsimons showed up with trucks full of staples plus dozens of watermelons, bags of bananas, oranges, the monks' eyes widened.
"Some monks had never eaten or seen these fruits and were treating watermelons like footballs," Fitzsimons laughed.
Typically, the monks at Sera Mey live off a few basic nutritional staples such as rice, dahl and bread. The life of a Buddhist monk is very hard, Fitzsimons explained. "It's a choice," he added.
"In hindsight, it probably would have been best only to buy what they needed to survive," he said referring to rice and dahl.
It took hours for the food to be unloaded from the trucks and almost immediately the monks began lining the items on the monastery steps in an offering to Buddha.
To cap off an already unforgettable experience, the Dalai Lama visited Sera Mey that week, leading 87 initiation ceremonies while Fitzsimons and the others were present. Each initiation takes eight hours.
Fitzsimons made good on this promise to "take it to the next step" when it comes to ensuring the Tibetan monks can preserve their way of life and study at Sera Mey. He still co-ordinates regular deliveries of rice and dahl to the monks from his home in Toronto.
Fitzsimons will to return to India next March to buy more food and hopes to use the trip as an opportunity to generate awareness about the need at monasteries like Sera Mey.
He recently pitched the idea to his friend and celebrity chef Art Smith. Smith is Oprah's former chef and has cooked for U.S. President Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela, among others.
Smith will prepare traditional Tibetan meals over the course of three days for the monks at Sera Mey and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The visit will be featured in a documentary set for release in 2010 and segments are expected to air on Oprah.
Meeting the monks at Sera Mey has changed Fitzsimons' outlook on life. "Take a new sweater, for instance. Now I ask myself, how many monks can I feed for the cost of that sweater?"
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This is just wrong but if I were to send something to the politicians I would have sent the brain!
