The Sunday Times, London - 3 December 1995 - by Caroline Lees. Kathmandu

WITH her badly frostbitten fingers and toes, Doma Lhamu could hardly manage the last 30 miles of her hazardous trek across the Himalayas The 10-year-old girl, wearing a thread-bare jacket and soaking-wet plimsolls, struggled in agony to keep up with others wading through deep snowdrifts on one of the most dangerous mountain passes between Tibet and Nepal.

There was no point in crying. The only adult was a paid guide who was indifferent to her tears. Most of the others in Doma's group were Just as young as her, sent by their parents on the long trek across the mountains in the hope that they will find a better life away from Chinese rule.

Doma, whose parents sell vegetables in Lhasa. the Tibetan capital, is one of a growing number of children who risk death fleeing across the mountains for a taste of freedom in India or Nepal, and an education uncontaminated by communist propaganda.

Doma's group, like countless others, took a route that avoided Chinese border guards, nut it involved weeks of climbing at altitudes above 15,000ft, under the shadow of Mount Everest.

The refugees travel by night and sleep during the day. They have no tents or sleeping bags. Every meal is the same: tzampa, an unsatisfying gruel of flour mixed with water and salt or sugar. Hot tea and dry' clothes are rare because fires cannot be lit in the snow.

The price of freedom is high. Some children are injured during the trek; others die. Last week the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) airlifted three children from the mountains to a hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal. where they were treated for frostbite and altitude sickness.

One eight-year-old boy recently had both legs amputated; a 10-year-old girl has spent weeks in hospital as doctors battle to save her blackened, frostbitten fingers and toes.

Tenzing. a 10-year-old boy, suffered severe frostbite after wading through chest-high snow for days on end. Every day he and Doma queue with other children to have their bandages changed at a makeshift clinic for refugees in Kathmandu. Doma screams in pain when the nurse pulls the old bandages off; Tenzing grimaces, but tries not to make a sound.

The children risk arrest as well as death. Dorje, a six-year-old boy, reached Kathmandu only on his second attempt. The first time he tried to cross the Tibetan border last April, his group was arrested by Chinese border police and he was imprisoned.

He was handcuffed and his legs were beaten truncheons. After a month in one of China's main political jails, Dorje was returned to his peasant parents.

"His parents were told that if Dorje tried to leave Tibet again, they would be severely treated and imprisoned," said a Nepali guide.

"But they decided it did not matter what happened to them; they wanted their son to leave Tibet so that he could go to school in India."

The refugees arriving in Kathmandu are taken by bus to India, where they are looked after by the Tibetan community.

Children are sent to a network of free boarding schools run by the exiled government of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader.

"There are no good schools left in Tibet," said Ngawang Thupten Chuteng, a Kathmandu-based representative of the Dalai Lama.

"All the schools are run by the Chinese and they only teach Mandarin. The Chinese want to destroy the Tibetan culture by making sure our children know nothing about it."

Daniel Alberman, of the UNHCR office in Kathmandu, says that up to 30 children arrive in Nepal every month from Tibet. Most are too young to understand why their parents have sent them away. Last month Alberman collected a five-year-old girl who had been left in a mountain village by her group because she could not keep up with them.

But to children like Dorje, the trip to Nepal has been a big adventure. He is looking forward to India: he thinks he will be able to buy a bycicle there, which he can take back to Tibet to show his younger brother. Nobody has yet told him that he will never go home.