Rigzen Wangmo
Turning an Entire Village Into a School
Rigzen Wangmo
Rigzen Wangmo grew up in a small village in Nubra Valley, Ladakh, at a time when there was no school there past a certain grade. Most children in villages like hers either left for Leh or didn’t go much further at all. She was lucky enough to get a seat at Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya, a government-run boarding school in Leh, and finished her schooling there. Then, like everyone told her to, she kept moving toward “good education” — a bachelor’s and a master’s in zoology from Ramjas College, Delhi University, a subject she now admits she fell into more than chose. “I didn’t quite know why I was studying,” she says. “I was just following what everybody told me to follow.” She was the first person in her family to go to school at all, let alone this far from home.
The Long Way Back
It was volunteering with children in Delhi’s communities that first pulled her toward teaching, and a two-year Teach For India fellowship in Pune that made it real. She arrived speaking English and barely any Hindi; her students spoke Marathi. For months they mostly communicated in gestures. “That was, I think, the turning point of my life as an educator,” she says, “because I really saw and felt the power of relationship in teaching and learning.” She came home to Ladakh and spent three years as academic director at SECMOL, the well-known alternative school near Leh, before applying — almost on a whim — to two universities abroad, one in Finland and one at Harvard. Finland turned her down. Harvard didn’t. She wrote her own application, with no counsellor and no polish, and cried through most of the drafts. “I just told my story,” she says. “I don’t think any counsellor could have told it better than I can.” In 2022 she went to Harvard’s Graduate School of Education for a master’s in Teaching and Teacher Leadership, half-expecting it to hand her some final answer about what “excellent education” actually meant. Instead, she says, it pointed her home: “I realised that this excellent education and meaningful education actually exists in my own village and nowhere else.”
The Village is the School
That realisation became Village Lab Foundation, which Rigzen started in Sumoor, in Nubra Valley, a little over two years ago with her co-founder Sonam Dorje. Children from six villages come after their regular school day for a programme built on a simple, stubborn idea: there is no classroom, because the whole village is the classroom. A lesson can happen on a farm, by a pond, in an orchard. And the people qualified to teach it aren’t necessarily the ones with degrees. “Anybody who has experienced wisdom and knowledge — and everybody has it — can teach,” Rigzen says. “No degree can compare the kind of knowledge that our elders have.” For a session on Ladakhi history, she doesn’t reach for a textbook written, as she puts it, “ten thousand miles away by someone who has not even seen a single rock or monastery wall.” She calls a grandmother who once hosted Silk Route traders in her own house.
Sixteen Small Libraries
Sixteen mini libraries are now scattered through Sumoor, placed where people already gather — the bus stop children wait at, the spot where villagers line up for water. Rigzen had built them with children in mind, but that first winter she watched elders start using them too. One grandfather comes to sit on the stone outside the library and works his way through the Kesar epic a little at a time, marking his place with a leaf before he leaves. In July 2024, with support from the Leh hill council, Sumoor was declared Ladakh’s first “Book Village.” At the inauguration, most villagers didn’t quite know what a library opening was — so word went around instead that there was a village festival happening, and everyone, young and old, showed up for it.
What the Children Are Becoming
The clearest change Rigzen sees isn’t in test scores. It’s that when she asks her students to reflect now, they actually do — pushing past “this happened because of this” into something more of their own. Last winter, older students researched and produced their own short documentaries on village history, tracking down twenty-five to thirty elders to interview, with no instruction from Rigzen beyond technical help from Sonam. One group walked twenty-five kilometres toward Panamic to research its hot springs, got picked up partway by a stranger who ended up feeding them lunch and showing up at their final screening. A fifth-grader named Tsewang has gotten so fluent with a DSLR that when she picked one up at her uncle’s house, he warned her it was tricky to use manually — she was already changing the shutter speed and aperture herself, and taught him something about his own camera.
Rigzen is candid about what still isn’t working — differentiating for children with very different needs, especially those with disabilities, is something she says the foundation hasn’t cracked. But what keeps her there, she says, is watching children who wouldn’t say their own names out loud two years ago now walk in after school and start talking before anyone asks. “Seeing them grow,” she says, “makes me really happy.”