I Escaped From Tibet

When I was a child, I used to look after the cattle with my mother. Our village is very small and the school has only 15 students. My father was a farmer and he knew the value of education.

He sent me to the village school in 1993, and for four years, I was determined to study hard so I wouldn’t waste my parents’ support. Because of my financial situation, I would work with old books and pens collected from the garbage.

As soon as I finished primary school, my father suddenly became ill. I had to take him to the hospital, where the food and lodging were even more expensive than the medicine and consultation fees! In addition, we had to deposit 4,000 Yuan as security at the time of admission.

If any of the patients failed to give the hospital staff presents like wine, they were not examined well. In desperation, we had to sell two cows and three sheep to raise money for my father’s treatment.

The root cause of my father’s disease was his prolonged imprisonment and torture by the Chinese police in 1959. I was really fortunate my father survived. However, that year many Tibetans became orphans.

We Tibetans are deprived of education and our own culture. It is socially acceptable in Tibet that people have no work and no money. It is the law that each and every citizen has to pay taxes to the government, but the Chinese government collects taxes beyond the reach of most Tibetans’ income, and they annually fail to fulfill even their basic necessities.

It is for this reason that my father could not afford to even buy salt for preparing tea after his recovery. So I thought it was better to go somewhere in search of work, rather than continuing school.