tibet

Tibet

xxx

www.fretnotgospel.com/tibet.html

Sonam the Yak Herder

What are the Tibetans world famous for? They are very famous for Mt. Everest and the rest of the Himalayas. They are also famous for the Dalai Lamas and monks and Buddhism. They are also famous because China took over.
What do you admire about the Tibetan people? I admire how nomadic they are. I also admire how they don't seem to complain about moving from place all the time and having to gather up their tents and stuff. I also admire that they don't complain about cold.
What do you pray to Jesus about Tibet? I thank God for Tibet's beautiful mountains and wildlife and yaks. I thank God for the Tibetan people because I know that He loves them. I pray that the people will be free to choose what they want to believe and not have to be Buddhists or spirit worship-pers. I pray that Tibet will not be oppressed by China so that they can have more freedom and that they can use their own natural resources and not have China suck them all up. That would make them less poor. I pray that people will stop deforesting the land so that the wildlife won't die and because the land is so beautiful.

Tell me about yaks. The yak is a big, furry, hooved animal from the Himalayas. Yaks have big, long horns. Yaks are sometimes called grunting oxen. Nomads use yaks for many things includ-ing making their tents out of yak hair felt. They make felt by wet-ting yak hair and mashing it until it is hard. Nomads also have yak dung fires, yak butter lamps, yak hair blankets, yak cheese, and yak butter sunblock. Yak stom-achs are used for storing yak yogurt. I would like to try yak yogurt even if it was stored in a yak stomach. Female yaks are called dris. Domestic yaks are shaggier and smaller than wild ones. There are crosses between cows and yaks that are called dzoes. I like all the yak stuff, I don't know why.
Tell me about the aweto worm. There are almost no insects in the high mountains, but the aweto worm lives there. It is a brown caterpillar of a moth. This three inch caterpillar and a fungus that grows with it is used in Chinese and Tibetan medicine. I do not understand anything about that fungus or how it grows with the aweto or moth. People digging for the awetos living out the winter underground cause prob-lems in the mountain meadows. The problems are trampling grass, cutting down bushes, and digging too many holes so the plants don't grow back. That is a problem becaue it takes hundreds of years to fill just a little bit of dirt.

Tell me about Tibet. A popular name for Tibet is the 'Roof of the World' because it has the highest mountains in the world. The very highest of all, Mt. Everest, is along the Nepal-Tibet border. A high plateau north of the Himalayan mountains is called Chang Thang. It is higher than the highest peaks in the Rockies or the Sierra Nevada. It is very cold in Tibet. China calls Tibet Xizang or the Tibet Autonomous Region, but it is not really self-ruled. The biggest river is the Yarlung Tsangpo. It flows along the northern side of the Himalayas, around the eastern end, and then along the southern side and then it finally drops into the sea. Many of the lakes on the Chang Thang are salty! The people are hard to count because the nomads are moving all the time. People think there is about 2.5 million people. The people are physically hardy but they live shorter lives than other Chinese.
Is there much wildlife in Tibet? Tibet does have alot of wildlife. Tibetan antelop, snow leopards, alpine marmots, gazelles, and wild asses live on the plateau. The antelopes grow horns as long as 28 inches. Wild oxen, wild horses, ibex, and blue sheep live on high rocky mountainsides. Alpine marmots are called snow pigs. There are more than 500 kinds of birds including snow finches, Tibetan rose finches, doves, pipits, robins, wheateaters, griffon vultures, snow grouse, sunbirds, bar-headed geese, ruddy shelducks, brown-head gulls, black-necked cranes, Tibetan golden pheasants, and swans. The fish include salmon and carp without scales called the naked carp. There are deforestation problems that endan-gers the wildlife. Two of the endangered forest animals are the red panda, and the giant panda.
Tell me two unique customs from Tibet. They have the Butter Festi-val, celebrating yak butter. They have what they call 'sky burial' where they crush their dead to give to vultures. They think of this as a person's last act of generosity.

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Learning how to love everyone

Country of the Month         Restaurant

Jan 2003 - Armenia            La Mediterranee, Berkeley
Feb 2003 - Poland              Old Krakow, San Francisco
Mar 2003 - Ireland             Kells, San Francisco
Apr 2003 - Jamaica            Jamaica Station, Oakland
May 2003 - El Salvador      Balompie, San Francisco
Jun 2003 - Nepal                Kathmandu, Albany
Aug 2003 - Turkey             Bosphorus, Berkeley
Oct 2003 - Cambodia         Angkor Wat, San Francisco
Dec 2003 - Philippines        Aroma Cafe, Concord
Jan 2004 - Saudi Arabia      Rihab's Bakery, Belmont
Feb 2004 - Mexico             El Huarache Azteca, Oakland

soldiers tried to stop them by waving their arms but it wouldn't stop them. So they started to run toward their trucks and left but the yaks broke their windows as they were leaving. And ever since that day we haven't had any trouble with Chinese soldiers. But I still have trouble with getting the yaks out of the tent.

What was the food like? We ate at a restaurant that was sup-posed to Tibetan but it was really Nepalese. It's name was Lhasa Moon. But now it is Taste of the Himalyas. The only Tibetan food was momos. They're like little volcanos filled with chicken. The outside was dough. I liked momo. I would like to try all the yak and sheep dishes.

FIRST IMPORTANT THING ABOUT TIBET
Tibet is a Buddhist nation. Nearly every-body is Buddhist but there are small numbers of Muslims and Christians. There is also a religion called Bon which is spirit worship. Bon monks also do Buddhist practices, and Buddhists do spirit worship. Because of that they won't dig mines or cut trees down because they think that will disturb the spirits that live there. They also worship mountains. They put shrines and prayer flags on moun-tains. Buddhists do not believe in God. Bud-dhism is a philosophy which means it is a set of ideas. Buddhists believe in reincarnation which means the same person's spirit being born in a new body over and over again. A magazine article about Tibet said, "Buddhists believe escape from suffering and attaining peace come through self-knowledge and self-discipline. Reincarna-tion will occur until desire is gone. At that point they will cease to exist. This state they call nirvana." They believe that nirvana is a state of perfect enlight-enment, the end of desire and suffering. In fact, Buddha means enlightend one. So they spin prayer wheels, and chant 'om mani padmi hum', wave prayer flags, become monks, pray while walking around a temple, follow the eight-fold path of doing right things because they believe that if they don't they will be reincarnated as a poor person or even an animal. The also do spiritual exercises that they call tantras. They believe they earn their way to nirvana because of the law of karma. In Tibetan Buddhism, compassion is the high-est virtue. Buddhists also think that there is no reality and everything is just illusion.
Do you agree or dis-agree with Buddhism? I disagree with it because I believe in God. I know that there is reality. I know that we do not earn our way to heaven. We get there by accepting Jesus as our Savior. I know that heaven is not the same as nirvana because I know that we will never cease to exist there. And I do not believe in spirit worship.

Country of the Month

by Noah Arthur

I am a nomad boy that takes care of our family's yaks. My name is Sonam and I am 14 years old. Every day I take the yaks to graze out on the land near the tent. It is pretty hard to get the yaks to come out of their tent. Sometimes it takes an hour to get the yaks out because they keep walking back into the tent. I think it is because they want to sleep some more. When they do that I call them 'sleepy horns'. The land is flat but there sometimes are ditches that look like just part of the field. The ditches are places where aweto diggers have dug. I have never seen an aweto digger but I have seen an aweto but it crawled away before I could catch it. My job is to chase away anything that might hurt the yaks and make sure there is grass and fresh water nearby. Bears and Chinese soldiers might try to get my yaks. One day two weeks ago, a bear tried to get my yaks but I grabbed sticks and rocks and snowballs and threw them at it and it ran away. A few days after that, there were Chinese soldiers trying to get my yaks. I could see them around the edges of my herd trying to get the yaks to come twards them with hay. I called my mom and she didn't hear me. I called my dad and he didn't hear me. I tried throwing sticks and rocks at them but they

just laughed. I tried throwing snowballs at them but they just laughed more. And then I scared my yaks by throwing sticks and rocks and snowballs at their hinders, and made them stampeed toward the Chinese soldiers. The

THIRD IMPORTANT THING ABOUT TIBET
Tibet's ruler, the Dalai Lama, is in exile. His real name is Lhamo Dhondrub. Dalai Lama is a title for ruler, mean-ing 'Ocean of Wisdom'. The first Dalai Lama was Gedun Drup. He founded the Buddhist monastery of the 'Yellow Hats' in 1445. The fifth Dalai Lama is know as 'The Great Fifth' because they think of him as the greatest ruler in their history. What made him so great was that he unified Tibet. He made Lhasa the capital. He built the Potala Palace and new monasteries. He made the ones already around better. He died in 1682. The 13th Dalai Lama mod-ernized Tibet. He formed an army with modern weapons. He put in telegraph lines and built a hydroelectric plant. He opened an English school. The 14th Dalai Lama is the one in exile now. He lives in Dhar-amsala, India and teaches about peace. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. They pick Dalai Lamas by who seems to be the reincarnation of the last one. There is some time when there's no Dalai Lama. They pick young boys.

SECOND IMPORTANT THING ABOUT TIBET
Tibet is under the rule of China. In 1950, China took Tibet. They over ran it with their soldiers. Tibet agreed to be "liberated" at first but in 1959 Tibet said all agree-ments were void. China stopped the rebellion with a war and 80,000 people were killed in Lhasa. The Chinese say that they reclaimed a historical territory by conquering Tibet. They also took Tibet because of Tibet's many natural resources and to add to its empire. China confis-cated the animals and land mostly from monks' farms and redistributed them into group farms called communes. China is putting communism on Tibet. China also put new taxes on property. They also closed almost all of the monasteries and put restrictions on reli-gion. Families are only allowed to have two children by Chinese law and if they have a third they have to pay a fine of more than their yearly income. In China, families can only have one, so Chinese are moving to Tibet and col-onizing it. Chinese is the first language. Babies in Tibet are three times as likely to die as in China.

FOURTH IMPOR-TANT THING ABOUT TIBET
Some Americans really love Tibet. I think some Americans love Tibet because they love Buddhism and Tibet is the heart of Buddhism. We know that some Americans love Tibet because we see "Free Tibet" stickers on cars, and the Dalai Lama is very popular.

Tell me about their history. Tibet has been conquered by Nepal, Manchuria, Mongolia, China, Jammu, and Great Britain. In 1913, Tibet became it's own nation under the Dalai Lama. They had serfs

which are the same thing as slaves except they are not owned. There were monk soldiers. In 1950, China took over Tibet and Tibet agreed to be "liberated". In 1959, Tibet said that all agreements with China were void, and China killed 80,000 Tibetans.

Country of the Month         Restaurant

Mar 2004 - Mongolia          Col. Lee's Mongolian BBQ, Mtn View
May 2004 - Switzerland      Fondue Fred's, Berkeley
Jul 2004 - Afghanistan        Da Afghanan Kabob House, Fremont
Sep 2004 - Morocco          Menara Moroccan Restaurant, San Jose
Nov 2004 - Portugal           Souza's Restaurant, San Jose
Jan 2005 - Thailand            Saysetha, Oakland
Mar 2005 - Tibet                Taste of Himalaya, San Francisco
Apr 2005 - Korea

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