Charity Takes a Road Less Traveled

Few causes in the U.S. are as fashionable--or as poorly understood--as that of Tibet. While celebrities pose and pontificate about Tibet’s subjugation by China, backers of the Chinese government on one side and the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, on the other remain locked in a war of words.

But for the Kham Aid Foundation, a growing Pasadena-based charity, the task of providing basic services to ethnic Tibetans in one of China’s remotest areas leaves little room for romanticizing or politicizing.

The Kham region in western Sichuan province defies many of the generalizations common to debates about Tibet, which Communist Chinese forces entered in 1950.

Geographic inaccessibility, history and a provincial government policy that is more lenient than that in the adjacent Tibetan Autonomous Region, or TAR, have combined to keep Tibetan culture in Kham relatively well-preserved.

“This is a living place. The Tibetan traditions are here,” says Kham Aid’s founder, Pamela Logan.

Kham lies on the edge of the Tibet-Qinghai plateau and is one of the traditional homelands of ethnic Tibetans. About half the roughly 4.5 million ethnic Tibetans live outside the TAR.

Kham Aid’s projects require Logan to make several trips to Kham each year. The group brings Italian conservationists to restore Buddhist temple murals. It plants trees. It distributes medical equipment and teaches midwifery and home health care. It sponsors teachers, students and the publication of Tibetan-language books.

A recent mission to deliver 90 wheelchairs to disabled people in three Kham counties was launched in cooperation with the North Hollywood charity Wheels for Humanity. The distribution team included volunteer physical therapists from the California Health Department.

With a truck full of wheelchairs, the mission headed west from Chengdu, the Sichuan capital, on the road that leads to Tibet’s capital, Lhasa. The road climbs onto the Tibet-Qinghai plateau, passing powerful rivers and mountain meadows carpeted with lush grass and wildflowers.

The group’s final destination was Litang county, one county over from the TAR. According to official statistics, the population in Litang is 95% Tibetan, and the county seat is more than 13,000 feet above sea level. This is one of the highest towns in the world--higher than Lhasa--and leaves most visitors gasping for breath on arrival.

Tibetans Living Off the Land

The countryside on the way to Litang is largely untouched by modernity. The Tibetans here exist in hard, bucolic surroundings, living in stone houses and reaping crops of barley, wheat and corn. Some herd yaks, sheep and horses and live in yak-hair tents.

Ruddy-faced Tibetan horsemen with 10-gallon hats and long knives ride short Mongolian ponies over the hills. Tibetan girls congregate wearing turquoise and silver jewelry and smelling of yak butter and bubble gum.

In one village, the team fitted a wheelchair for a 36-year-old cerebral palsy victim. His life on a wooden wheeled plank about the size of two skateboards had seriously deformed his limbs and torso, making the task difficult.

Farther down the road, the head of the local Communist Party school piggybacked his son into the guest house where the therapists were at work. Mentally and physically disabled, the boy had never been to school and seldom left his house, where he was accustomed to crawling to get around.

Many of the wheelchair recipients and their families were overcome with emotion upon receiving the chairs, which they would otherwise be unable to afford. In any case, the nearest place they could purchase them would be Chengdu.

The therapists meticulously adjusted each wheelchair and instructed the new owner’s family about its use. But the care and attention seemed superfluous to many recipients, who were overwhelmed by the contrast between having a wheelchair and not having one. Once word got out that the chairs were being distributed, disabled Tibetans appeared unannounced in hopes of getting one.

Logan does most of the fund-raising for Kham Aid. Contributions come from many countries, and most donors choose to sponsor schoolchildren. The average donation--about $300--pays for a year’s schooling for a young Tibetan, often one from a peasant family that would otherwise be unable to educate the child.

Kham Aid also has received about $40,000 in U.S. State Department funds to mount disaster relief operations in areas of Kham hit by earthquakes in recent years. And the U.S. Embassy in Beijing has provided money for cultural preservation, which the group has used to support a Tibetan publishing house in Dege county.

The charity is active primarily in Sichuan province’s Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, which was closed to foreigners until two years ago. Now, other nongovernmental organizations have begun to trickle into the area. It is still a poor and difficult place to work. Mountain roads are often washed away by mudslides, electrical blackouts are common, and the region lacks medical and other basic facilities.

Charity Founder Made Trek to Western China

Logan’s involvement with Kham began in the early 1990s. With a doctorate in aerophysics from Stanford and a third-degree black belt in shotokan karate, she set off in search of Kham’s legendary Khampa warriors. She later chronicled her futile solo attempt to reach Lhasa and her explorations of western China--and herself--in the 1996 book “Among Warriors.”

After that, “I knew I wanted to come back and do something legitimate, not just as an illegal tourist,” she recalls.

Lean and purposeful in appearance, Logan, 42, speaks Chinese and some Tibetan. Her experiences in Kham have left her with little patience for Westerners’ romantic notions of Tibet, which, she says, can be dispelled by “a week in a nomad’s tent.”

Her experiences also have given her views a balance that is rare in a field fraught with controversy.

Much of the information about Tibet comes from either the Chinese government in Beijing or the Dalai Lama’s exiled government in Dharamsala, India. The two sides’ accounts are often contradictory, and independent observation and study are difficult because China usually restricts access to Tibet to tour groups and journalists under government supervision.

Logan points to contrasts between Kham and the TAR to question generalizations about the plight of Tibetans.

For example, relations between Han Chinese and Tibetans are much less tense in Kham than in the TAR. Unlike the TAR, where Beijing has had to send in large numbers of Han Chinese to achieve control and development, Kham has long been a racial and cultural melting pot for the two groups. The influence of the theocratic regime in Lhasa has historically been weaker in Kham, which has often been ruled by ethnic Chinese.

“Tibetans here complain not that Chinese are ruling them but that they aren’t ruling them well,” Logan says.

Local officials in Kham, both Han and Tibetan, appear less obsessed with stability, sovereignty and control than their counterparts in the TAR. Government restrictions on monasteries, including caps on the number of resident lamas, are less strict, and there are few “patriotic education” sessions to denounce the Dalai Lama.

“Government cadres’ thinking is more open in Kham than in the TAR,” says an ethnic Tibetan official in Kham.

Still, analysts note that the freedom enjoyed by Tibetans in Kham is relative and that government policies have grown harsher in recent years.

For much of the 1950s, the Khampa warriors put up a fierce but futile resistance to Chinese rule. Over the years, numerous lamas from the Tibetan region, including high-ranking figures known as “living Buddhas,” have sought refuge overseas, particularly in the Tibetan communities of India and Nepal.

In early August, a bomb exploded in the town of Kangding on the Chengdu-Lhasa road, leading authorities to suspect that it was the work of Tibetan separatists.

Police Crack Down on Religious Retreat

And more recently, many Tibetans in Kham have been upset about a police crackdown on the freewheeling monastic encampment of Serthar in northwestern Sichuan. In recent months, police have evicted hundreds of monks and nuns on the grounds that the ad hoc cluster of cabins and tents has become unsanitary and a hide-out for suspected criminals.

Local officials would probably not welcome Kham Aid if it involved itself directly in religious matters, but Logan remains greatly concerned about such issues.

“Much of Tibet’s strength comes from its Buddhists, who are trained in the art of compassion,” she says. “My Tibetan friends here want better religious teaching and leadership, but the quality of that leadership has fallen in recent years.”