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Feature - A journey to freedom

A Tibetan man comes to Canada to find the values that led to the United Nations

Prayer flags ring the outside deck of an apartment in Kitsilano where Tibetan, Tashi Gyall, relaxes on a Saturday afternoon. Incense filters out of the living room. A Buddhist statue of Manjushri, the deity of wisdom, holds a raised sword above his head from his resting spot on the mantle above a wood burning fireplace. The raised sword is a Buddhist symbol for slashing through ignorance; striking a blow for freedom.

Nine years ago Gyall began his quest to slash through the ignorance – demonstrated and imposed – by the Chinese who invaded Tibet. On Sept. 14, 1994, his last night in his home village, Gyall and his best friend went to a movie.

"I’m leaving tomorrow and may never be back again," Gyall, 18 at the time, joked.

Gyall didn’t want to tell his friend he was serious. Friends and family members had been jailed for trying to leave Tibet. His grandparents were jailed by the Chinese army in 1950 when it invaded Tibet. They died in jail, Gyall’s father never knowing which jail they were in, how they died or how much they suffered.

The U.N. pledge of tolerance and peace among neighbours hasn’t been part of the Tibetan-Chinese experience for more than 50 years. Tibetans are afraid the Chinese army will invade again and are constantly on their guard because of what they have witnessed in the past.

Gyall is the fourth of five children. He was born in a wooden enclosure, shared with cows and a donkey, in YahRi, a village of about 26 families in eastern Tibet. Located in a wide valley surrounded by fields and high mountains, the winters in YahRi are very cold and the villagers stay home doing small jobs and looking after their animals. But, Gyall speaks fondly about his village, where there are apple, apricot and plum trees.

"It’s so beautiful in summer," he says longingly.

For all its beauty, however, Tibet is an occupied land. Gyall was too young to understand what the Chinese occupation meant, but he remembers from a very early age having a dream of coming to Canada.

He was not happy at school, where conditions were miserable and the children were sometimes beaten. If the children cried when they were being beaten they could be beaten again. Students were directed to study Chinese culture and learn the Chinese language. The longer Gyall stayed in school and was subject to the Chinese assimilation program, the more he felt he didn’t have a future in Tibet.

He heard people talk about India, a country that has some respect for human rights, and about a town in India where Tibetan exiles lived. Unable to tolerate the Chinese occupation and persecution of his beliefs, Gyall knew he had to leave Tibet. He wanted to pursue his dream of freedom, but that dream would mean a dangerous escape from Tibet to Nepal, then on to India, before he had any chance of coming to Canada.

On Oct. 1, 1994, wearing jeans, a thin nylon jacket, a sweatshirt and a pair of cloth shoes, Gyall joined 15 refugees and began a 16-day hike over the Himalayan Mountains to Nepal. Walking 18 hours a day over mountain trails the refugees – nomads, farmers, a few monks and unemployed youth – hiked over trails that were sometimes steep and icy. And sometimes there was no trail at all. The refugees ate tsampa; a traditional Tibetan porridge eaten raw or mixed with water, tea or milk.

Gyall was resting at the Nepali border when he noticed an ex-monk sitting next to him hiding money inside the lining of his bag.

"It was very dangerous," Gyall says. "In Nepal the army is always looking for money. They want to catch Tibetans and give them back to China. If the Chinese catch the refugees there are beatings and sometimes people are shot. People are put in jail."

With only 15 minutes sleep that night, Gyall and the monk followed a rough cobblestone road through a forest of small trees.

"All night, we could hear a huge river," Gyall continues. "Then, we had to cross a bridge and it was very scary."

The 1 metre-wide bridge was made of rope or hemp and stretched 25 metres across a very high canyon. The bridge swayed in the middle and the refugees, afraid the bridge would collapse, went down on their hands and knees to cross.

Gyall and the monk continued ahead of the other refugees until about 2 a.m., when they came to a village. The two refugees were trying to pass through a market when in the shadows front of them they saw two soldiers lighting candles.

Gyall and the monk were apprehended and taken to a long flat house near the market where three Nepali soldiers searched them by candlelight. The soldiers tore through the refugees’ meagre belongings, throwing underwear, socks and shoes on the floor. When the soldiers found nothing they beat Gyall’s friend and then began shouting and hitting both men.

"Dalai Lama, Dalai Lama!" Gyall and the monk pleaded putting their hands together in prayer.

Gyall offered the soldiers 300 Nepali rupees, but that only made the soldiers angrier.

"Chinese yuan!" the soldiers demanded as they continued to hit the refugees.

They tried to make the soldiers understand they had no Chinese yuan. Then Gyall remembered the monk had yuan hidden in his bag . If the soldiers found the money things could have gotten very bad.

"If we lied then they would really beat us," Gyall says.

But after an hour of beatings and intimidation the soldiers let them go. Later, Gyall learned the monk had hidden 1,000 Chinese yuan, about $130 Cdn, in the bottom of his bag – enough to pay the rent on a decent house in Nepal for two months.

They were in Nepal, the first leg of Gyall’s journey to freedom, but he was disappointed when he reached the Reception Centre outside of Kathmandu. The Centre was in a very small house. Each refugee was given a small blanket to sleep on and another blanket to try and keep warm. Gyall had lost weight during the hike and his legs were swollen but, his condition paled in comparison to other refugees; many had fingers and toes that were red and black with frostbite. Their digits looked like soft fruit that had gone rotten.

After registering in Katmandu as a refugee in exile, Gyall was given some money to buy food and then sent by bus to Dharamsala, a town of 20,000 people in northern India. Ten thousand Tibetan refugees live in Dharamsala, a scenic hilly town of one-storey, flat-roofed houses 1,200 metres above sea level. Gyall remembers his first morning in Dharamsala.

"It was raining and very hot," he says.

He lived in a rented house sharing a small room with three people for almost two years. That one room was everything: living room, eating room, kitchen and sleeping room. The bathroom was an outhouse and the tenants had to pump water from a well and bring the water up to the house in buckets.

"It wasn’t pure or clean at all," Gyall remarks. "It was dirty from people, animals and wind and rain."

It wasn’t long before the polluted water and unusual food made Gyall sick. He got nose bleeds four or five times a day, his face broke out in rashes and his hair fell out. After a month, he came down with appendicitis. He was hospitalized for 14 days, released and returned to the hospital a month later to have his appendix removed.

Life was hard in Dharamsala but at least Gyall was able to learn about Tibetan culture from other Tibetan refugees. He attended the Academy of Norbulingka in the village of Sitpur where he studied Buddhist philosophy, Tibetan language and literature.

While at the academy, Gyall visited Nyngtobling, a school for handicapped Tibetan children. Some of the children were blind or had deformed hands. Others had hearing problems and couldn’t speak. There were children who were very shy who sat on mats looking down at the ground. Others were disturbed and fought among themselves.

The children were starved for love and attention. Most had been institutionalized from a very young age and the school was the only world they knew.

Gyall was sick with a stomach ailment but he went to the school every day and played with the children. It wasn’t only the children who noticed him there.

Lesley Thomson, a teacher from Vancouver who was teaching English at the Academy of Tibetan Culture in Dharamsala, was very impressed.

"He was trying to teach the children crafts so they could be self supporting," says Thomson, who met Gyall in 1998.

Thomson works in the English Language Studies for Adults Program at Vancouver Community College. The 51 year old is originally from Montevideo, Uruguay, where her family was uprooted almost overnight after a communist government came to power. Naturally that event had a profound impact on her own beliefs about freedom.

"I depend on freedom with my life!" Thomson proclaims.

She became one of five people who sponsored Gyall in his bid to come to Canada.

Thomson returned to Canada from India in May of 1999 to start the process of getting a visitor’s visa by sending Gyall a letter of invitation to come to Canada. But in Dharamsal, Gyall’s health took another turn for the worse. The climate in India and his already weakened condition caught up to him. His weight dropped again, he became pale and his eyes turned yellowy. The 40-minute bus ride to Sitpur made him ill. In June of 2000 Gyall was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

The next nine months were trying for both Gyall and Thomson, whose parents also had severe, and ultimately terminal, health problems.

"It was a terrible, terrible time," Thomson recalls.

But after nine months of medication and a healthy diet, Gyall began to recover – and to resurrect his dream of coming to Canada. But his successful battle with tuberculosis had become an obstacle to emigration. Like other Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala, Gyall had been classified as "durable" and locally integrated with the population. Therefore, he was not considered a candidate for immigration to Canada. His journey to freedom was dragging into years.

Going back to Tibet, where his family remained, was not really an option.

"I would have to agree to make peace with the Chinese government," he says. "They could put me in jail or research what I did in India."

There were spies in the school Gyall attended in Dharmsala and in his village in Tibet. He could be arrested within five minutes of returning to his house.

"They could just pick me up and put me in jail and my family would not be told," he says.

Things had changed in Tibet, too. Young people were increasingly losing the value of looking after themselves and were becoming more and more dependant on Chinese culture. Gyall would have encountered a lot of problems if he’d returned home.

In the meantime, Thomson was working in Vancouver and travelling to India trying to keep Gyall’s morale up.

"I think Tashi had almost given up," she recounts.

Gyall had stopped returning Thomson’s e-mails.

But then Thomson received an e-mail from a mutual friend suggesting Gyall was about to get his visa. And then she received a call from Immigration Canada telling her Gyall had received his visa.

On July 7, 2003, nearly nine years after he began his journey, Gyall stepped off an airplane in Vancouver a free man. He started English language skills classes in September. He thinks he would like to become an English teacher or work in tourism management.

"I am thinking it would be nice to do tourism in Tibet," he said from the outside deck at the apartment in Kitsilano where he is staying.

Gyall’s suffering has given him an understanding that if people are free they can achieve many things. He wants to use his freedom in Canada for the benefit of his country. He believes there are a lot of ways he can help people in Tibet and in his own village.

"We are losing everything in Tibet," he says quietly. "People are very, very sad."

In some areas the Chinese are building factories and air pollution is damaging the grass that livestock feed on.

"Yaks and sheep are dying from diseases that before they didn’t have," Gyall says.

The Chinese government wants the land that belongs to families in Tibet.

"Each family has their own land and if their animals cross the line for grass there is fighting," Gyall explains. "Families have sheep and yaks and only a small amount of land. If the animals go onto another family’s land the landlords fight sometimes with knives. If someone is killed the fighting between two families will never stop."

Thomson senses that because Tibetans feel powerless to stop the onslaught of Chinese culture they turn inwards against themselves. It’s a resentment of a foreign culture that she says is not unlike what happened to First Nations people in Canada.

"Tibetans are looking at the Chinese who have all this technology and it’s like rubbing it in your face," Thomson says.

The older people are passing away and younger Tibetans are losing their language, culture and religion.

"All things are for the benefit of China but there is nothing for the Tibetan people," Gyall says.

Something priceless has to happen for Tibetan culture to survive and flourish.

"The people need to be free," Gyall says.

cutlines:

pic #1. Tashi Gyall’s eleven-year-old nieces have never been to school. They work on the farm at home. "I want to bring them to Canada," Gyall says.

Pic #2. Tashi Gyall enjoys his freedom on a recent trip to Whistler with Blackcomb in the background. Gyall had dreamed about immigrating to Canada since he was a child.



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