PART 1 - Reeling In The Threads

At home packing up a few days before going back to Tibet. More like packing a list in mind of things I have to take, and unpacking small wraps of language and etiquette from memory. I have been a few times before, touring or staying with friends there, but never like this, going to make a report on program status and recommendations for next year. For a program that’s been running twelve years. Fortunately Nawang, the Development Director will be there and in charge. He’s been with Future Generations for over eleven years, and at least will recognise what looks different in the Pendebas lives who’ll we be visiting.
Pendeba are trained by people like Nawang to be resources in their communities. The Pendeba (which means, “Person who benefits the village” in Tibetan) are chosen by their community to take part in multiday training sessions with other Pendeba about: health care, conservation, and income generation opportunities. The people chosen generally come from small villages in remote corners of the province. They are always associated with an existing or proposed conservation area, usually by way of living there.
The program was initiated in the Qomolangma National Nature Preserve. Mt Everest, in China. The park was created in 1985 with the help of the organisation’s president. Ten years later the same people involved began the Pendeba Program. I’m going back with Nawang to check out the program, record observable outcomes, and generally to get a sense of what it’s all about through meeting the people involved.
I’ll spend most of the month in Nyingchi Prefecture where many government and non-government groups are working towards creating another park, the Four Great Rivers Protected Area. It’s a region of thick forests and deep watersheds that feed over one billion people downstream. The Brahmaputra, Salween, Mekong, and Yangtze rivers flow through these valleys collecting runoff from the massive mountains above. The region covers 46,000,000 hectares of northern Tropical forest, high alpine, and 7,000 meter peaks. Within China alone, eight hundred thousand people live in this future park. But logging companies have been extracting here for decades, mining companies are exploring new reserves, and the ancient forests that support Snow Leopards, Tibetan Antelope, and Ghoral are growing smaller day by day. In the early 1990s a ban was put on logging in the Upper Yangtze basin after a spring of tragic floods in eastern China.
The last couple of times I was in “Tibet” were to stay with my friends at a small monastery I’ll call Dru Deng. I became connected to Dru Deng after happenchance brought me to share a room with two monks at a hostel on the east coast of China in 2005. Qing Zhu and his apprentice we’re painting a mural that by the time I left was the size of a full moon in the outline of a Buddha. Qing Zhu gave me his business card when I left and said I should come visit him. A couple of weeks later I skipped out of language school in Shanghai and did just that. I’ve been back three times since: once with my dad, and once last fall for a month.
The plan was that I would stay at Qing Zhu’s house and spend most of my time in the temple. When I got there though I learned that the temple plan was off, and that Qing Zhu’s grandma had passed away two weeks before. It all became a little awkward. But, Qing Zhu and everyone else I knew there insisted that I stay. A funeral, they said is no reason to leave. The awkwardness was never far away though since the funeral prayer, The Book of The Dead, still had twenty five days to go.
The previous winter, Qing Zhu and I had raised a small bunch of money for the monastery school with a combined effort selling his paintings in a calendar in my home town. Not that either of us gained a dime from the proceeds, now that he saw the potential he wanted to talk seriously about how we could make money. He’s been doing not bad on his own though over the last couple of years. He drives the first car in his village, has flown across China, and regularly brings back modern and stylish gifts for his friends and family with money earned selling his artwork and traditional medicine in big cities across China. For a drop of perspective, his parents live in a big wood and rammed earth home with half a dozen bare light bulbs and a five dollar a year electricity bill.
What should I have done? I arrived after a year long expected visit to this remote place, to find my post-modern monk friend praying for his deceased grandmother while shuttling Lamas across the tight valley between the monastery and his family home, and making the six hour roundtrip to town to pay others for a good year’s harvest of caterpillars. He was insistent that I stay in his home, – a place that resonated each day with the chiming and flowing of Buddhist ritual. Weeks later a friend said to me, “everyone sings their own pitch, there’s no rehearsal or harmony. Praying is like a free ticket to Heavenly Mountain.” Sometimes it sounded like Heavenly Mountain was miles away, and other times, like it had already come every one of them.
I like to think we were both torn. Me by the cultural fascination of Qing Zhu’s community, him by his fascination with change, and both of us by the cross cultural humbleness of death; neither of us were quite sure how much heed to pay it. I’ll be the first to admit too that my decision to stay was partly selfish.