Lessons have continued fine this week. With the arrival of Ashley, she has teamed up with Margo to split classes into two groups so that all 5 teachers will have enough lessons. They're getting on with it well and I let Ashley watch one of my lessons today, along with giving her some teaching tips.
The weather has been ok so far. It has been quite cold during the night on some days but it's mostly sunny.
The founder of the school, Lugyal turned up yesterday. He lives in Switzerland but has a holiday so came to visit. It was nice to meet him; he's a friendly man and easy to chat to.
I finished reading Tears of Blood on Sunday and would seriously recommend it to people as it really is time we stopped ignoring the Chinese dictatorship before they get too much control over the world.
Before I give you some more extracts from that book, the one I've started reading is rather different. It is a story of an Englishman who went to volunteer in Ecuador (nearer to Quito) and his humorous accounts of his time there. Apart from the dreadful use of English, it's an easy and fun read and it reminds me of many things from there. It's called That Bear Ate My Pants!
Anyway, going back to the serious things, here are another couple of quotes from the book about Tibet.
A prisoner's account from 1960: A monk interviewed said “Even when we had broken limbs from the beatings and the torture, we still had to work. We would get frostbite because we had nothing to protect our hands and feet. Sometimes it was so cold that the flesh on our hands would tear off and stick to the shovels. To make us change our thinking and support Chinese rule in Tibet, they hung prisoners upside down in empty rooms and beat them with batons. Sometimes they forced other prisoners to do the beating, so that the Chinese would not have to take the blame.”
In 1979, delegates visiting Tibet made up a list of the things that had happened during the 30 year occupation by China:
- 1.2 million Tibetans, 1/5th of the population, had been killed or died of starvation.
- 6,254 monasteries and nunneries had been destroyed
- 60% of Tibet's literary heritage had been burnt
- Amdo (an Eastern region) had become the world's biggest gulag, with 10 million prisoners.
- One in every ten Tibetans were in prison. 100,000 were in labour camps.
- Forests and Tibet's unique wildlife had been wiped out.
I will post more and they tell stories of events up to when the book was published in 1999.
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