Habitat Breaks Ground
For 1st Tibetan Family

Meet Dorjee and Tsering Wangdak and their daughter Tenzin. They and an extended family of ten share a single house. Their crowded circumstances are about to change, thanks to the house Habitat for Humanity is helping the young family build and move into.

Saturday afternoon two dozen doctors and other staff volunteers from Yale-New Haven Hospital gathered with the family for a formal ground breaking on one of two houses that Habitat is building at 32 and 34 Sylvan Ave. between Ward and Howard in New Haven’s Hill neighborhood.

As the sponsor of the Wangdaks’ house and a second slated soon to rise on the adjoining lot, Y‑NHH Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Richard D’Aquila presented a check for $100,000 to Habitat. That covers all construction materials and more for the two houses, which will be the 73rd and 74th Habitat has built in New Haven since 1986.

After Y‑NHH helped build its first house with Habitat on Wilson Street last year, so many hospital employees wanted to volunteer that two construction sites were needed.

The work involves not just building a home, but building the larger home of New Haven, said one of the volunteers. Then he grabbed a hammer and a fistful of nails to work with Dorjee and others on readying the first wall.

From a refugee settlement in south India to the crowded quarters it currently inhabits in Hamden, the Wangdak family has had a long journey. (Click here for a 1993 New York Times article on early TIbetan immigrants in Connecticut.)

In 1991 Tsering’s father was one of 1,000 lucky Tibetan refugees in India and Nepal to receive via lottery a visa to the U.S. Codified in the Immigration Bill of 1990, the lottery was part of an arrangement orchestrated by the Dalai Lama and the administration of the first President Bush.

Tsering’s dad’s lottery sponsor happened to live in Torrington. Eventually she and her siblings came over and settled there. They moved to Hamden in 2003. In 2005, Tsering went back to India and married Dorjee and sponsored him. He joined her in becoming a citizen in 2008.

For the past two years Dorjee has worked in the housekeeping department at Y‑NHH, short blocks from the site of his future three-bedroom, one-and-a-half bath Habitat home. Housekeeping includes cleaning up blood and environmentally hazardous materials.

It was just a coincidence, said Habitat’s executive director, hat the beneficiary, Dorjee, is an employee of the sponsor.

The Wangdaks were part of an initial pool of 83 applicants who were winnowed down based on their employment and credit history, the degree of their housing need, and their suitability to do the volunteer work to help build their house and continue to be involved in their new community.

“They were exemplary,” said Habitat Family Selection Committee chief Howard Smith.

“I’m very fortunate,” Dorjee said. ​“We’re a poor family. I can’t afford to buy. And it’s close to the hospital. I don’t need a car.’

He said his 2001 Volkswagen Jetta is at present, and for theforeseeable future, not operational.

Tsering works at Hilltop Nursing Home in Ansonia and is taking nursing courses at Gateway Community College. Dorjee hopes to work his way up at Y‑NNH.

First he plans to rearrange his schedule to put in some of the 400 hours of labor he most donate, part of his commitment to Habitat and his personal sweat equity on the house.

His plan: To work on the house from 9 to 2, and then go to work at the hospital on the shift that begins at 3.

Tthe Wangdaks’ house and the one next door were the third and fourth of eight properties that Habitat has recently bought in the Hill. Habitat previously built three houses on Hallock Street; the two on Sylvan make five; and three yet unbuilt properties nearby make eight.

Habitat has a particular commitment to the Hill and Newhalville, said Bill Casey. ​“We try to go to neighborhoods with the best chance of success,” he said. That means if a block is all troubled, they’ll buy the block, if possible. Or if a block has just one rundown house, they might offer to buy and restore it.

The plan on Sylvan is to have the other family, which has not yet been selected, move in at the same time as the Wangdaks, perhaps six months from now.

In the meantime, about ten volunteers a day will be working and in the process helping the Wangdaks build and establish themselves in the Hill and in America.

One of the volunteers and financial supporters, Suzanne Lagarde, a Y‑NHH physician, paraphrased Newark Mayor Corey Booker: Volunteerism draws me closer to the divine.

While Habitat is nominally a Christian organization, that has no bearing on the recipient selection or the process, said Casey.

The Wangdaks will be the first Tibetans to move in a New Haven Habitat house. And they are Buddhists. At the dedication ceremony Tsering said she plans to have a rimpoche, or holy man, come up from New York to say prayers and play the traditional drum and horns to bring good luck to the family members.

She the state’s small Tibet community is largely concentrated in Old Saybrook. Families gather in Old Saybrook once a year at a stupa, a shrine maintained there for prayer, lighting incense, and meditation.

She and her family say daily prayers before they sleep and before they go to work. Soon they’ll be saying them on Sylvan Avenue.