impression is of a cross between Gregorian Chant and Slav folk-music. And somehow the fact that during the day one has seen these illiterate, filthy young women carrying hundredweight sacks of stores up the steep slopes, laughing and joking among themselves, wiping babies’ bottoms, horseplaying with the young men from the Upper Nursery and sitting picking over each other’s heads for lice, gives a special poignancy to the solemn rhythm and fervent quality of their chanting. People may argue that Lamaism is a corrupt hotch-potch of esoteric teaching, worthless to the average Tibetan peasant, but these ayahs at their prayers belie this. They may know very little about their religion, yet unless they felt itas a significant force in their lives they could never render these hymns as they do. Even from a purely aesthetic point of view the performance is astonishing: I couldn’t help comparing it with the alarming noises that pass for hymn-singing in the average Irish country church. The children also chant their prayers before going to bed and show an equally remarkable talent.
At the Upper Nursery today we saw some of the pictures painted by Doris’s art-students in the four-to eight-year-old age group. All the exhibits were good and two were quite exceptional. It is noticeable that Tiblets have a much bolder approach to design than most Western children, and one immediately suspects that this is the result of their total dependence, for amusement, on their own ingenuity. Watching them playing with scraps of torn paper, bottle-tops, cardboard boxes, bits of tinfoil or sticks and stones, one realises how damaging our elaborate toys can be. Here the children’s minds are kept alert and supple by the continual exercise of inventiveness and they probably get more pleasure from a brightly coloured Vim tin than European children get from a five pound doll or a twenty-five pound toy motor; between dawn and dusk that Vim tin will be a doll, a ball, a steamroller, a rattle, a boat and a rifle. Oliver tells me that an American tourist visited the camp a week before my arrival and was so appalled by the lack of toys that she promised to send ten crates of the things from New York on her return home. US AID (Ability for Impeding Development).
9 AUGUST
Every day more adults are coming to the Dispensary during out-patient hours and I notice that they have wonderful physiques; both men and women are muscular and well-proportioned and were obviously adequately nourished from birth – unlike the unfortunate present generation of Tibetan children. Most travellers in Tibet before the Invasion remarked on the fact that one rarely saw an underfed Tibetan; in those days the national economy was virtually self-sufficient, with enough surplus grain stored in the Government and Monastery granaries to insure against the occasional emergency caused by badweather. Throughout recorded history Tibet has never suffered from famine – until the influx of Chinese soldiers and settlers sent prices soaring and wrecked her simple national economy. Judging by results a feudal system, however theoretically deplorable its persistence may have been, was very well suited to the people and conditions of Tibet.
Most of the ills from which Tibetan adults now suffer are brought on by the change of altitude and by their exposure to diseases unknown in the antiseptic climate of Tibet. Naturally they have no resistance to the myriad bugs of India, and their peasant reluctance to adapt habits of clothing and personal hygiene to a hot climate doesn’t help. They wear so many clothes and the system of putting them on is so intricate that getting down to skin-level is a day’s work. En route one encounters a rich variety of lice, fleas and bed-bugs, and as all the refugees’ most precious possessions are stored around the waist, in a pouch formed by the upper half of the ‘chuba’, one has to look out for a shower of little bundles on getting that far. My original
At the Upper Nursery today we saw some of the pictures painted by Doris’s art-students in the four-to eight-year-old age group. All the exhibits were good and two were quite exceptional. It is noticeable that Tiblets have a much bolder approach to design than most Western children, and one immediately suspects that this is the result of their total dependence, for amusement, on their own ingenuity. Watching them playing with scraps of torn paper, bottle-tops, cardboard boxes, bits of tinfoil or sticks and stones, one realises how damaging our elaborate toys can be. Here the children’s minds are kept alert and supple by the continual exercise of inventiveness and they probably get more pleasure from a brightly coloured Vim tin than European children get from a five pound doll or a twenty-five pound toy motor; between dawn and dusk that Vim tin will be a doll, a ball, a steamroller, a rattle, a boat and a rifle. Oliver tells me that an American tourist visited the camp a week before my arrival and was so appalled by the lack of toys that she promised to send ten crates of the things from New York on her return home. US AID (Ability for Impeding Development).
9 AUGUST
Every day more adults are coming to the Dispensary during out-patient hours and I notice that they have wonderful physiques; both men and women are muscular and well-proportioned and were obviously adequately nourished from birth – unlike the unfortunate present generation of Tibetan children. Most travellers in Tibet before the Invasion remarked on the fact that one rarely saw an underfed Tibetan; in those days the national economy was virtually self-sufficient, with enough surplus grain stored in the Government and Monastery granaries to insure against the occasional emergency caused by badweather. Throughout recorded history Tibet has never suffered from famine – until the influx of Chinese soldiers and settlers sent prices soaring and wrecked her simple national economy. Judging by results a feudal system, however theoretically deplorable its persistence may have been, was very well suited to the people and conditions of Tibet.
Most of the ills from which Tibetan adults now suffer are brought on by the change of altitude and by their exposure to diseases unknown in the antiseptic climate of Tibet. Naturally they have no resistance to the myriad bugs of India, and their peasant reluctance to adapt habits of clothing and personal hygiene to a hot climate doesn’t help. They wear so many clothes and the system of putting them on is so intricate that getting down to skin-level is a day’s work. En route one encounters a rich variety of lice, fleas and bed-bugs, and as all the refugees’ most precious possessions are stored around the waist, in a pouch formed by the upper half of the ‘chuba’, one has to look out for a shower of little bundles on getting that far. My original
Similar Books
