On a cold grey day at the end of March , shortly after my return from India, I first met a Tibetan in Western surroundings β the foyer of a central London hotel. I had been working for some months in Dharamsala, then an overcrowded and under-funded refugee camp for Tibetan children, and that moving encounter with the Tibetan way of being made me feel slightly apprehensive about Lobsang. How would this young man, only five years out of Tibet and three months out of India, be reacting to our Western ways?
The second youngest of eight children, he was born in in Lhasa where his civil servant father practised as an oracle. Born the son of a government oracle, he is now the grandfather of an IT-savvy seven-year-old. At one of these β Tubung Churbu, twenty miles west of Lhasa β Lobsang spent his school holidays in a small community of a hundred monks, some of whom were his contemporaries. During term time a warmhearted Lhasa aunt mothered him and three of his brothers.
To avoid the Chinese, refugee caravans used perilous passes over high mountains and this comparatively short journey took more than three months. Half the mules were lost through injury. Lobsang and his friends suffered acutely from loneliness and grief; they already sensed that their exile would be permanent.
Would the Chinese successfully pursue them? He spoke only Tibetan and a little Chinese and could not begin to imagine the world beyond the mountains. He was then unaware of the significance of money; always his needs had been provided for yet soon he was to be unsupported β¦. But not immediately: at Kalimpong Uncle arranged for his nephew to lodge with Sherpa Tenzing of Everest during the monsoon, while learning Nepali, Hindi and English. In fact he wished to equip himself with some means of helping the tens of thousands of illiterate Tibetans then drifting about northern India in bewildered misery.
There Joyce Pearce of The Ockenden Venture discerned his capabilities and offered him the opportunity to help settle orphans in European homes, which is what brought him to London. Before we said goodbye at Waterloo station Lobsang had accepted my invitation to spend his summer holiday in Ireland, on the smallest of the three Aran Islands. It seemed to me that a Tibetan would find himself at ease on Inisheer, an intuition soon confirmed by Lobsang.
