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LAMDONModel High School · Zanskar
Lamdon students in blue tracksuits playing with a frisbee on an open school ground with mountains and school buildings behind.

Student life

Everything a school day is, at 3,600 metres

These photographs were supplied by the school. Nothing here is stock photography, and nothing here is staged for a website.

Lamdon students in blue tracksuits playing with a frisbee on an open school ground with mountains and school buildings behind.
Games period on the open ground beside the classrooms. Physical education is part of the taught timetable.Sports

Sport

A field of bare earth, and thin air

Games period runs on the open ground between the classrooms and the compound wall. There is no turf, no pavilion and no floodlight; there is a frisbee, a ball, and a valley standing at the edge of every fixture. Physical education is on the timetable rather than added to it.

Students in blue tracksuits throwing a ball at rectangles painted on a concrete wall, mountains rising behind the school ground.
Students take turns at targets painted on a compound wall — an improvised court made from what the campus has.Sports

Improvisation

Targets painted on a wall

Where equipment is scarce, the campus makes what it needs. Rectangles painted onto a concrete wall become a court; a queue of students becomes a rotation. It is a small thing, and it is exactly what a school looks like when it is run by people who intend it to work.

A Zanskari mother in traditional maroon dress carries a child on her back while another child walks beside her on a stone path, snow peaks behind.
A mother and her children on a field path in the Zanskar valley. Most of the school's families live along paths like this one.Culture

Community

Families along the field paths

Most students walk in from villages along the valley's field paths and irrigation channels. Their families farm barley, peas and alfalfa and keep sheep, yaks and goats. The school year is set around that work and around the weather that governs it.

A long line of Lamdon students in maroon uniforms laughing on a dusty school ground, with bare Zanskar mountains behind.
Students of the lower classes lined up on the school ground at Pibiting, the Zanskar range behind them.Students

Friendship

The line on the school ground

A whole class arranged for a photograph, holding a pose for about as long as children ever do. Lamdon has taught close to gender parity for most of its history — a fact worth stating plainly for a school at this altitude and this distance from anywhere.

7 photographs, and room for the rest

The full archive

The visual archive begins with the images the school supplied. Each one carries its own caption, alt text, category and usage rights, so the collection can grow — and be replaced with high-resolution originals — without touching the design.