About Trish Deitch Rohrer

Richard Gere sees his work for the Tibetan community in India as part of his practice on the Buddhist path. "The way to freedom is working through this," he says. Two years ago, a four-year-old boy was left at the offices of an HIV care and prevention organization in New Delhi called Naz. Both of the boy's parents had died from AIDS, it turned out, and the boy was infected. Though his extended family had adopted his older brother, who wasn't infected, they didn't want the sick boy. "The child was left on our office premises," says Anjeli Gopalan of Naz, "and I went completely nuts." Gopolan became the boy's legal guardian, and, inspired by that child, started the HIV/AIDS Care Home for Women and Children, the only residential home in all of India for the growing population of women dying of AIDS and their sick and/or orphaned children. The Care Home is funded, for the most part, by Richard Gere's Initiatives Foundation, the new public affiliate of the ten-year-old, private Gere Foundation. On the day that I spoke to Gopalan, she had just, for the first time, sat down with Gere in person. What she learned from him was that she would now have the funds to expand the home from ten beds to sixteen. Furthermore, Naz (Urdu for "pride") would be able to rent a second home, where the children can live when they were feeling well. "When they're sick, they can come back to the Care Home," Gopalan says, great excitement in her voice. "Otherwise they can live in their own home. You know?!" She laughs, delighted. "Now with this money coming in, I can do that. It's such a relief!" It is estimated that millions of children orphaned by AIDS will be homeless in India by the year 2010. The hope is that Naz's HIV/AIDS Care Home will be a model, something that other foundations can replicate. This is the idea behind all of the projects that Gere is funding, and hoping to get others to help him fund: that they'll serve as models, as the blueprints that local communities can work from, not only in India but in all developing countries. About Richard Gere, Gopalan says, laughing, "Today what really resonated for me was that he's so down to earth, so in touch with himself. That made me feel absolutely energized." Gopalan, her load lightened, laughs again. "I was like, 'Thank God there are people like this.' It keeps your faith in human beings. I just think someone like him shouldn't be like this—such a kind person. There's no reason for someone to be like this." The first time I met Richard Gere I was sitting on a park bench outside a train station in a picturesque small town I'd never been to in upstate New York. It was nine months before my phone call with Anjeli Gopalan. I'd never met Gere and I didn't expect to, even though we are both Buddhists, and even though I'd made my living as a celebrity journalist. I was, in any case, waiting for a ride to a dharma center, Karmê Chöling, five hours north, from a woman named Betty whom I hardly knew. Betty was 45 minutes late. It was a gorgeous fall morning, though—the day strikingly vivid and clear—so I didn't mind waiting much. Then, as should always happen on particularly splendid day like that one, Richard Gere walked up and introduced himself. It's true: he just walked up out of nowhere, in a baseball cap, smiling, very handsome, and said, "Are you Patricia?" Well, I am Patricia, though nobody but my mother calls me that. In any case, I said yes, and he held out his hand and said, "I'm Richard." O.K. Sometimes life goes this way: tides of magic suddenly roll in. His face matched the day: full of cheer. I thought, how extraordinary that Betty would send Richard Gere to pick me up. The morning was perfect and getting more that way. He said, "You ready?" and I said, "Sure," and he took my duffel bag and we walked to his shiny red pickup parked down the street. Why was Richard Gere picking me up? Certainly he had better things to do. I said, "Are you going to Karmê Chöling?" We were already in the truck, both of us still smiling, happy, it seemed, to be there on that day, and he put the key in the ignition. He looked at me, started up the truck, said, "No," and put the thing in gear. I nodded. We started to roll backward, him looking in the rearview mirror to make sure there was no one behind him. Everything was easy, really nice. Still, I said, "But—you know Betty, don't you?" He stopped this time, and looked at me. His eyes were friendly, kind. "No," he said. We sat there then, two Buddhists, looking at each other, the day barely less perfect than before, just slightly stranger. Then he said, "Are you a massage therapist?" I thought, oh shit. "No," I said. There was a moment of silence, the sun shone through the trees, a bird sang, a person or two walked by. He said, "I was coming to pick up a massage therapist named Patricia for my wife." There were so many possible replies, but I just said, "That's not me." Thinking back on that day now, I don't know what we did then—whether we smiled, or shook our heads or didn't. I just know that it felt good to be sitting there with him, despite the grand faux pas. He said, "Here, I'll help you with your bag," and we stepped out of the truck, and he came around to my side and flipped my duffle out of the flatbed and onto the sidewalk. Together we walked back to the bench, where a woman was waiting. I said to her, "Is your name Patricia?" and she said, "Yes," and she turned to him and he to her and that was that. They walked away. Betty eventually showed up. When we met again, eight months later, there was no way to let him know I was the one showing up; all he knew was that a journalist was coming to his Manhattan offices to interview him about his new Initiatives Foundation. So the first thing he said as he stepped up to greet me was, "We've met," and I could see him trying to remember where, figure it out. I reminded him: lovely town, fall day, park bench, massage therapist. He took three steps back fast and laughed. Though it was sweltering in New York, it was cool and pleasant in the anteroom of his production company and foundation offices, which had photographs of His Holiness the Dalai Lama all around, and dharma books. He was wearing a green, thin-wailed corduroy, jean-style jacket over a white T-shirt, and a pair of black pants. "That was you," he said. I said yeah, and shrugged, and he said, "You must be very trusting, to get in a truck with a stranger like that." I didn't say, "You aren't a stranger," because that would have been too complicated at that moment to explain: It wasn't just that I've seen his films, and so he seemed, on that fall day, very familiar to me. It was also that the depth of his Buddhist study and practice, his devotion to his teachers, and his adherence to the Buddhist view, made him no stranger. A fellow practitioner had come to get me from the park bench by the station. That was obvious. "I met Richard in Bodhgaya in 1986," says Rinchen Dharlo, president of the Tibet Fund, "during a teaching by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. And a year later I was transferred to New York to be the Dalai Lama's representative and to head the Office of Tibet here. The People's Republic of China, which is a strong member of the security council, with veto power, never allowed the question of Tibet to be raised in any forums of the United Nations. I remember that when you told people where you came from, they would say, 'Tibet? Where is it?' But that was the situation in those days. "The situation has changed since then, mainly because of the visits of His Holiness the Dalai Lama around the world, the release of major motion pictures, resolutions adopted by the U.N., Congress and parliaments worldwide, and newly established and expanded Tibet support groups and dharma centers throughout the world. And part of the credit should go to Richard Gere, who remained so steady, who remained like an eloquent tree, in terms of campaigning and supporting the Tibetan culture." In 1987 Gere co-founded Tibet House in New York, where the full spectrum of Tibetan culture could be displayed in one location. According to Rinchen Dharlo, it was Gere who proposed that 1991 be the "International Year of Tibet," and spearheaded a campaign of a thousand programs worldwide, including public talks, film festivals, conferences on Tibet, performances and cultural programs. Gere funded several important teachings during that time, including the Kalachakra initiation given by His Holiness the Dalai Lama in New York. At the same time Gere was working hard to raise money for AIDS research, as well as doing what he could to raise public awareness about human-rights violations around the world. Since then Gere, now the Chairman of the International Campaign for Tibet, has funded traveling surgical camps in Tibet to save the sight of Tibetans blinded by cataracts. He provided emergency relief in both India and Tibet after snowstorms killed much livestock. He has paid for the publication of important Buddhist books, including Dzogchen master Tulku Ugyen's two-volume masterpiece, As It Is, Tsoknyi Rinpoche's Carefree Dignity, and many volumes by his own teacher, the Dalai Lama. He also supported the publication of Sorrow Mountain, the heroic, heartbreaking story of the late Ani Pachen, known as Tibet's warrior-nun. Gere's own office has to be the size of two or three standard New York living rooms. We are sitting in two of the old stuffed chairs that are set around a low table far from his desk. I am complaining about the heat in New York and the crowds, and he tells me about something the Buddhist scholar Jeffrey Hopkins' teacher once said. "You know how most of us," Gere says, "when we're doing our meditation, and we hear a sound, or a human voice, or someone's knocking on the door, we go, 'Fuck!'?" He laughs, and so do I. "Well, Hopkins' teacher's first impulse was..." here Gere snaps his fingers once—"Ah, a sentient being! Ah! A sentient being!" When Gere...

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