Namgyal Tsering
I was born in 1990 and I left Tibet in 2001 when I was twelve years old. I travelled in a group with my nephew. He was seven. We were the youngest in the group.
I come from a small village in eastern Amdo. My family were farmers. There were about two hundred people in my village. We lived a traditional life. We lived in clay houses and got our drinking water from the river. We had one house in the village and one in the mountains. In the summer I would take our animals up to the mountain and live up there for two months, looking after the animals. It was a two-to-three hour walk, up the mountain, to our mountain home. We had mules to carry our things. There were many glaciers on the mountain at that time. We had a clay oven and would light a fire with hay and wood. We collected grass and dried it to feed the animals in the winter. There were many forests so we had wood for making our furniture. There was no electricity.
We had a primary school in my village where we studied in Tibetan but we had to go by bus to secondary school. One hour from my village was a large Chinese town called Xining. The school was Chinese-run. It had Chinese and Tibetan students. Every morning we must sing the Chinese national anthem. Tibet has its own anthem but we could not sing that. It used to be you could study the history and philosophy of Tibet but every year the Chinese changed the rules so there were less and less Tibetan subjects.
My father was not an educated man but he was very intelligent. He listened to the radio, Voice of America, every morning. This is how he learned about schools for Tibetan children in India. We were nine in my family. I have one younger brother and five sisters. My father decided that I should go to India and get an education.
I studied at Tibetan Childrens Village school in southern India. It was very hard, I missed my family very much. For the first year I could not communicate with anyone but my nephew because we spoke Amdo Tibetan and everyone else spoke Lhasa Tibetan. I was very lonely, especially on school holidays when most of the children went home and I had no home to go to. The teachers were kind but it was still lonely.
I believe in the Middle Way approach. It is not realistic to want a free Tibet. China has too many people and not enough land. Tibet has a lot of land and only six million people. China needs Tibet: they will never agree to let Tibet go. But China is doing a lot of destruction of the environment of Tibet, they are destroying the forests and mining the earth and causing terrible pollution. They are damning the rivers and causing flooding. Our glaciers are melting and our clear rivers are becoming dirty. Tibet must have autonomy to decide its own affairs. Also we need freedom to keep our culture and language.
I am studying French because I hope to go abroad. I would like to go to Quebec or France. I take lessons at Lha and I teach beginner’s French to other Tibetans. Every afternoon I study. I like to read books. I would like to go to college one day.
Now two of my sisters are married and have moved to another village. One sister is a nun and two are still at home. I have spent more than half my life in India but I still miss my family and my parents very much. I can only call them once every two months and we must be careful what we speak about. We cannot talk politics. My father is 67 and my mother is 63. I don’t know if I will see them again. I want to go back to Tibet but I will not go back until Tibet is free.
I believe in the Chinese people: I think the people are good; it is only their government that is not. Some day the Chinese people will demand democracy and they will see the struggle of the Tibetan people and understand. We must follow the path of Gandi-ji. Truth and non-violence are the only way we will win. The pen is mightier than the sword.
Print
Email
