World Tibet Network News Sunday, April 12, 1998

DHARMSALA, India, Apr 12 (AP) Sonam Dorjee waited for winter, a forbidding season in the Himalayas when Chinese patrols abandon their mountain outposts for warmer barracks.

Then he set out from his village in southern Tibet with his 8-year-old twins on a harsh journey to bring them to a school run by the Dalai Lama in India.

His job done, he will go back. It will be many years before he sees his boys again. Maybe never. But Dorjee, a 33-year-old woodcutter, has a wife, two more children and parents back home.

Dorjee is one of perhaps hundreds of Tibetans who will retrace a trail that brings some 2,000 Tibetans out of their homeland each year.

Dorjee's village has no road or electricity and is snowbound all winter. There are few Chinese in the village, but the children in its only school are taught in the Chinese language "and are very ill-mannered,'' Dorjee said. He refused to send his twins there, preferring to send them into exile.

"Without Buddhism and without the Dalai Lama, we have no spirit. My children might drift to the towns and lose their direction,'' he said.

Dorjee and three other adults brought six children to enroll them in the Tibetan Children's Village, an 11,000-student boarding school based in Dharmsala, the Dalai Lama's seat in exile.

Leaving home at dawn, they trudged for the first day through waist-deep snow. Their thick woolen clothes barely kept out the cold. They carried two cooking pots, ground barley, tea and butter. At night they sheltered in caves or behind rocks. The children crept inside the adults' coats to sleep in the warmth of body heat. The thought of freezing to death was never far from their minds.

After six days they crossed into Nepal, where they were caught by border police. Although Nepal allows transit rights, police routinely extort money from refugees, travelers say. Allegations of gang rape also are common.

Dorjee said the police demanded 500 rupees ($13) per head. They had planned for bribe money when each family sold two or three farm animals to finance the trip, he said.

Farther down the mountain, they caught a bus to Katmandu, Nepal's capital, where the Dalai Lama's administration has a reception center that helped them get to Dharmsala.

A day after his boys were accepted into the school, Dorjee watched them playing in the school yard.

The boys, Tsedup Dorjee and Ranched Wangle, showed him their "home,'' a cabin with two dormitories and a large central playroom. Forty-five toothbrushes bristled from a large cup on the windowsill. A simple lunch of rice and lentils was preceded by Buddhist prayers.

"I think I've done a very good thing,'' Dorjee said. "I'm relieved and happy and ready to go home.''