Absurdity, Allegory and China

I uploaded a slug of photos to the Flickr site last night, and it got me thinking about the first time I went to Lhade and Tongmer. I looked through my journal and found the following notes on that day.

March 31, 2006
Visited Lhade and Tongmer with Dorzha today. Both schools are first through sixth grades. We went to Lhade first, picking up a woman and a student along the road between Dongge and Lhade. Dorzha knew they were going to the school. Both of the schools are along the edges of a large nomadic area, and all the students are from nomadic families. Both schools, Lhade and Tongmer, close twice a month for four days to give the kids time to go home. Often the kids have a long way to travel just to get to school. Dorzha’s sister and her family live beside Lhade school; her husband is the school’s cook. They have two daughters – one at the Lhade school and the other at Dongge. As we looked around, the kids were filtering back to school from home, many on foot, though some on motorcycles driven by their fathers.

Dorzha was a student here from 1st thru 3rd grade, before the Lhade school added grades four through six. He pointed across the valley to a steep path that ran up into the mountains and said, “That’s the way to Tongmer school,” meaning that if we didn’t have a vehicle and had to walk, the path across the wide, rock-strewn valley was the most direct route. He said it was a five-hour trip on a good day, that the kids had to take it in order to go to the central school in Tongmer. When Dorzha attended the Lhade school and finished the third grade, he had to hit the path, a twice-a-month round-trip through an area with wolves when the nomads were absent, wild dogs when the nomads were present, and in the fall, spring and summer, a river to ford, which, at times, could be a torrent. Many of the nomads from the Lhade area chose not to send their kids past the 3rd grade for obvious reasons. Dorzha told of one trip when he was only ten, and he and another boy almost didn’t make it home because they had no food and were close to starving on the walk that turned into a twelve-hour marathon. When Dorzha was an ETP student he wrote a grant with the help of Kevin Stuart and was funded through the Canada Fund (Canadian Embassy) to the tune of ¥220,000 to build an extension to the Lhade school, which included the expansion of the facilities to include more classrooms, a kitchen and extra dorm space for grades 4-6, thus eliminating the trip to Tongmer Central school. The expansion increased the number of students who continued their education. Prior to the expansion project the enrollment at Lhade was 70 students, though only 60% of those who completed the 3rd grade continued on to Tongmer. Now, 100% of the students who complete the 3rd grade also attend grades 4 through 6 at Lhade, thus enabling them to continue their education at Dongge Junior Middle School.

We walked down to the dry river bed with his youngest niece and another boy. To the south the snow-covered peaks rose to 15,000+ feet. We wandered and talked, eventually ending up back on the road south of the school. I’d bought a bag of Tibetan milk candy in Dongge and when we returned to the school I grabbed it from the van. Some of the kids were very cautious about accepting it from me, but eventually most of them did. As I had found out on the way to Meilong last November, candy is a treat that should not be forgotten when you go into the deep Tibetan countryside. Candy is currency, and on the way to Meilong we were stopped by a work crew, mostly women with shovels, who reprimanded us for not having any, and then wouldn’t let us pass until we’d coughed up 10 RMB.

After we left Lhade, the driver was reluctant to go to Tongmer – too rough, not enough gas, etc., the usual number that drivers run when they want more money. We stopped in Dongge and had lunch with L., a young Tibetan woman who teaches English at the Dongge Junior Middle School. I mentioned that we’d planned to go to Tongmer, but the driver had balked at the idea. “There’s a teacher with a car here who will take you.” And sure enough, a guy with a beat-up white Santana gave us a ride. The road was long and rough, but not too rough for a two-wheel drive Santana. The day was overcast and the scenery dry and grim. On the way we had to stop the car as the teacher/driver received a call on his cellphone. He looked at the caller ID, stopped the car and turned the engine off, then said a few words to L. and handed her the phone which she answered. I could hear that the voice on the other end was male and not happy. She talked to him for a minute or two, and after she disconnected we continued on. I asked Dorzha what that was all about, and he smiled and said, “It’s personal business.” Back to the road.

We passed a monastery high on the cliffs on the south side of the road as we snaked and bumped our way towards Tongmer school. The terrain became more barren as we got farther from Dongge and deeper into the nomadic area. It reminded me of the Crystal Creek Rd. area in Bighorn County, WY, only the road here was worse and much narrower. We passed several nomads on horseback who were talking beside the road. Finally Dorzha said, “There it is,” and I could see a series of building up ahead on the left side of the road. We passed several people digging/cleaning out an irrigation ditch at the foot of a sheer dun colored cliff. We turned off the main road and into a small village which was like something out of The Treasure of the Sierra Madres only much colder. I could almost hear, “Badges? We ain’t got no badges! We don’t need no badges! I don’t have to show you any steenkin’ badges!”

Dogs and pigs wandered the one and only street that ran between a line of one-story buildings, half of which, if they hadn’t already fallen, were in the process. A few motorcycles in front of a store, straddled by dark-faced men in long weather-worn robes and black leather boots. One man was rebuilding an engine beside a sleeping chained dog. Wind. A man and a boy plowed a field with a horse and a single-bottom plow – the boy on the lead and the man following and leaning into the plow, breaking the dry ground up into clods of clay that looked more hardpan than soil. On a day like this it is hard to imagine that anything could grow here, the thought of green like a poke to the eye. It felt like this was the way it was, that anything different would be an offense, even if it showed signs of life.

At the west end, the bitter end, of what loosely passed for a street, the double iron gates to the school were wrapped with a chain and locked. We pushed them apart enough to slip beneath the chain. There seemed to be no one around. As we wandered Dorzha identified buildings. In the girls’ dorm building we came upon two girls who looked at the alien me with great distrust, but not fear. Both were wearing pink coats, and one had her head wrapped in a red-white and black plaid scarf. A retractable line of unwiped snot came and went from her right nostril, though I never saw her actually sniff it back up – it was there and then it wasn’t. The other, shorter and squatter, was hatless and, through an illusion of bundled clothes and posture, seemed to have no neck. Her ears nearly rested on the shoulders of her coat and her chin covered the top white button. Long strings of braids disappeared down her back beneath the back of her coat. How long? Both of them had intensely focused stares which I immediately recognized. I asked L. to ask them if they’d ever seen a westerner before. “Only on television,” they said. The thought of a televion didn’t compute until I remembered the satelite dish atop one of the buildings in the main court yard. I smiled and offered them candy, which they hesitated to take until L. told them it was okay. I ended up giving each of them a handful. We wandered into the two adjacent small dorm rooms and saw a series of wooden palates not more than two inches off the floor, all shoved together with blankets rolled up at the head for each student. We counted 12 rolls in one room and ten in the other. Twenty-two girls on the floor. No heat. As we continued our look-about, the pink-coated pair followed us. They were not the kids you see in the county seat. They were the hill people, outlanders who you think you glimpse in the distance,just before they disappear, floaters on the periphery of grand landscapes. They watch but never come too close. There was a beauty here in close-up that shook me. This pair was the farthest from me as I’ve ever met. Two young girls in second hand clothes from who-knows-where. The one with the hidden neck had a coat that had “Grenling” on the left breast. (So, this is where they come from!)

The girls followed and slipped out the gate with us when we got ready to leave. Others, all girls, wandered up the road toward school. Still, no adults present, but that didn’t matter to these kids. The bus from Guide, 50 clicks away, will arrive sometime before dark, and someone will unlock the gate for no particular reason. We gave the newly-arrived candy too, and they looked at me as if I was something from a dream – not a good dream, just a dream, something strange to chew on, like a big dog with a head of sculpted butter. The wind picked up, and the dust in the air to the west turned the distant light glassy with sand. This is what’s always up ahead here: grit and wind and cold and men trying to plant something and kids, despite the odds, trying to learn to read.

On the way back to Dongge the driver received another call on his cellphone. Same drill: stop the car, cut off the engine. We took a different route back into town, one that forded a creek (river in summer) and we nearly bottomed out on a large rock in the middle of the wide dirt path. We shared the road with horse-drawn and human-drawn carts. At one point we stopped and waited for some reason that was not apparent to me, though I was sure it had something to do with the male voice on the other end of the phone. Finally we moved and crept slowly into Dongge, through small mud-walled alleys. When we reached the school’s back gate L. hopped out and opened it, and we scooted in as if we were sneaking past a guard. After the requisite ‘thank you,’ the driver disappeared into a room, and I said, “Okay, Dorzha, fill me in on what’s going on.” Turned out the guy had text messaged a woman, and her husband, who’d received it, was not happy. The calls were an attempt to track him down. L. was the one who had to make excuses for him: “He doesn’t have his phone. He left it in the office, and I just happened to be here to answer it.” Love and fallout. Sandstorm too. By the time we got back to the Gui’de, the wind was hammering everything, and the gale-force grit hurt. Face blasted red and sore. Everyone took cover, under fire from Qinghai.