Stanzin Angmo comes from a place that claims the distinction of having several of the highest motorable roads in the world.

An international student at North Yarmouth Academy in Yarmouth, Angmo grew up in the small village of Stok in Ladakh, a remote region of northern India on the Tibetan Plateau in the Himalayas. Her father is retired from the Indian army. Her mother is a homemaker whose daily tasks include hauling water from a village pump.

Angmo was a top student at the Siddhartha School in Stok, which is sponsored by the Portland-based Siddhartha School Project. When she was in 10th grade, the school’s founder, Khen Rinpoche Lobzang Tsetan, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, offered Angmo a scholarship to finish high school in the United States.

“It was a very, very rare opportunity, and I said yes,” Angmo recalled. “I always loved English and my English teachers.”

Angmo credits a network of people with helping her to succeed here. She lives on Cousins Island with the family of Joanna See, a tutor at the academy, and she meets regularly with Freda Bernotavicz of Topsham, who has sponsored Angmo’s education since first grade.

“The first few months were very hard because I was a little homesick and I was shy,” Angmo said. But soon she made friends and got involved in activities, including several sports she played for the first time.

Last summer Angmo completed a monthlong internship at a New Jersey hospital with a fellow Siddhartha student, Tsewang Chuskit, who attended the Rockland County Day School in New York. They learned about women’s health issues and observed heart surgery and an ultrasound procedure.

Next, Angmo and Chuskit attended a summer science and engineering program for high school girls at Smith College in Massachusetts, where they took courses taught by experts in the field of young women’s health and wellness.

Then they went home to Ladakh, and traveled the Taglang La mountain pass, to share what they learned in presentations to adolescent girls and their mothers at several village schools. Much of it was basic information about puberty, menstruation, sexual health, hygiene and relationships that wasn’t readily discussed in their community.

“All of it was so new to us,” Angmo said. “Mothers don’t talk to their daughters about these things. It was nice to see them learning. I felt really happy to be able to remove taboos around women’s health issues and any doubts they have about their bodies.”

Angmo plans to study women’s health at Bennington College in Vermont.

“I want to help women in my hometown,” she said. “I have a lot more to learn here and a lot more to do there.”

– By Kelley Bouchard