Learning life lessons from rural teachers' wisdom

Tseringben was delighted once he saw the mysterious man's face.

In 2016, a guy wearing a military uniform and facemask bellowed to him at the local market," How are you, dear teacher!"

Tseringben sheepishly replied: "Sorry! I don't know who you are. Please let me see your face."

The soldier tugged his mask down and Tseringben's eyebrows shot up. It was a boy he'd once helped-now a man.

"He didn't study well," the primary school instructor recalls. "Teachers often called him in for extra review."

His parents left him to be raised by his uncle in Qumarleb county's Yege township in Qinghai province's Yushu.

"He felt inferior. So, he'd find somewhere to hide rather than go to school. One day, when we didn't see him, we went to his uncle's house. We looked everywhere. We discovered him sleeping in a dark room."

Tseringben asked the 10-year-old to come to school the next day. He told him to talk to him not as a teacher, but as a friend. The child confided that he was upset because other kids mocked him for being "stupid".

"I told him: 'I believe you can be the best. You need to believe in yourself. I can help you improve at school. It's important to be smart, but it's more important to be wise.'"

The child's scores soared. He earned more than 90 points on his Tibetan-language final.

That day in 2016, they talked for a long time. "If not for you, I'd be herding on some freezing mountain now," the soldier told his former teacher.

That's true for countless children, whose lives this good man from the badlands has transformed. And if I hadn't met him when I did, I may, too, be stuck on some cold and dark peak-in a sense that's metaphorical but still very real.

Tseringben and I met because he was selected to help me after I'd volunteered to buy and install solar panels in seven tents nearly 80 kids used as dorms in Yege.