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Doing her bit for Tibet
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To have the Dalai Lama for a brother is overwhelming enough. But Jetsun Pema is coping well
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Jetsun Pema: `As Buddhists, we Tibetans believe in living in harmony with nature.' — Photo: V. Sreenivasa Murthy
ALTHOUGH JETSUN Pema, younger sister of His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, exudes tranquillity and modesty, at heart she is a passionate patriot in exile from her homeland, Tibet. This, she explains, is the daily inspiration behind her work for the Tibetan's Children Village (TCV), an organisation established by the Dalai Lama in 1959, which today provides care and education to over 14,000 orphaned and needy Tibetan children.
By the time Jetsun was born in 1940 in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, her brother had already been discovered by oracles as the 14th Dalai Lama. She remembers: "My parents were originally farmers but were automatically elevated to the level of aristocracy and were reinstalled in the capital, together with my five brothers and sister. I visited my brother every couple of months with my mother in the Palace of One Thousand Rooms where he was always surrounded by officials, busily being groomed as the leader of Tibet. Consequently, to me he has always been more of a guru than a brother."
Jetsun left Tibet for India in 1950 together with her mother and sister shortly after the Chinese occupied the country in 1949. She attended convent school in Darjeeling and completed further studies in England and in Switzerland. Her brother, The Dalai Lama, fled to India in exile after the failed 1959 insurrection against the Chinese. Jetsun returned to India in 1964, at her brother's request, to take over management of the TCV.
Just 23 at the time, she said her appointment was a natural calling. "As a child I had always felt that I had to do something to help the Tibetan cause. Tibetan refugees began pouring into India after 1959 and thousands of children were orphaned. In addition, land pressure in the areas of refugee settlement meant that many children could not be adequately cared for. Back-up care and education were urgently required."
Today, the TCV runs five Children's Villages, 14 schools, 10 day-care centres, four Old People's Homes, and an Outreach program for over 2,000 children. Two recently completed boarding schools in Dehra Dun and Dharamsala — funded by a charity concert by the Italian opera singer Luciano Pavarotti — will house and educate an additional 1,700 children.
Expanding the organisation's capacity is a constant need, said Jetsun. "Even now 550 to 600 children, most of them below the age of 13, come from Tibet annually in search of education. Most of our children's villages are filled with these more recent migrants."
Jetsun returned to Tibet in 1980, as leader of the Third Fact-Finding Tibetan Delegation, invited by the Chinese Government to inspect the changes that had taken place. According to her, it was a shocking experience: "Our culture had been destroyed. The Chinese outlawed Buddhism, and of the 6,000 shrines, temples and monasteries only 10 or 15 remained. Vast areas of trees had been felled to excavate gold, silver and uranium, all discovered by the Chinese since the occupation, which has contributed to flooding problems in China and across Asia. As Buddhists, we Tibetans believe in living in harmony with nature. Timber was only cut for daily use. You could say we are almost backward in our lack of pursuit of modern materialism. The level of destruction was unimaginable, I shed tears everywhere I went."
Jetsun is doing everything she can in her exile to preserve what she believes to be a vital sense of national identity. "Until we are able to return to Tibet, our cultural heritage must be maintained... all the children in the TCV schools are taught Tibetan as a strong, second language."
Her patriotic efforts have earned her the title, "Mother of Tibet," awarded to her in 1995 by the Tibetan National Assembly in Exile, of which she was a member between 1990-93, in recognition of her dedication and service to Tibetan children. She is modest about the honour: "I stated at the time that I was accepting the title on behalf of all our village mothers, they are the ones who spend time with the children and do the toughest work."
She asserts that high politics and diplomacy are not for her and handed in her resignation from the Assembly to the Dalai Lama many times. As she puts it: " I prefer to be at the grass-roots level and see people's difficulties through their own eyes. I do not automatically attain good karma simply by being born as the sister of His Holiness, The Dalai Lama. According to Buddhism, each individual must discover himself, and this is my chosen path."
AGNIESZKA HINDLEY
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