By Adele Hulse

Sinking Borewells and Building Toilets since 1983

Dear Readers of Mandala,

I have been writing a column in Mandala since its first tabloid edition in 1987, the cover featuring Lama Zopa Rinpoche holding a very small Lama Osel in his arms. Twelve years later I think it might be time for a change for all of us, so this will be my last column for some time.

As you read on you might notice some sentences repeated from the column in the July-August issue of Mandala. The reason has a lot to do with the fact that I went to school in Melbourne with the editor of this magazine, the Venerable Robina Courtin, and we are very fond of each other.

So when that earlier column was printed short and without photos, I threw the kind of tantrum only very close friends can throw: “What do you mean, you edited it! What do you know about water and sanitation in Tibetan settlements. What do you mean you didn’t find the photos! This is the first publicity I have ever asked for the overseas aid work we have been doing in the name of FPMT since 1983!”

After a few solid Australianisms, we cut a deal: Ven. Robina agreed to print this column unedited. Besides the repetition, I have some delicate points to make so anyone wishing to complain must blame only me, not Mandala.

In 1983 Owen Cole came back from Sera Monastery in south India with photos of the little monks with great pustulous scabby wet sores all over their heads. “We have to do something,” he said. For the next five years I fundraised through what we called The Bleeding Hearts Charity Ball. We sank a borewell at Sera Je School and in 1984 provided health and education services to the Sewa Semiti Leprosy patients, a community on the Delhi fringe. Mrs. Sunita Kakaria, who has long been a special benefactor to the FPMT, managed the project. It was her wisdom to buy the community a color television set: “They have nothing to do, they get bored, then they fight,” she told me.

From 1985 on we set up partnership projects with the Department of Health of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile in Dharamsala. At the remote Manipat settlement in Madhya Pradesh, FPMT built and staffed a health clinic, sank seven borewells and funded a follow-up health and hygiene education program.

Our next project site was Jampa Ling settlement north of Pokhara in Nepal, where we built 27 toilets with septic tanks. The Australian government agency, AusAID, granted dollar-for-dollar subsidies on all projects except at Sera: exclusive communities are ineligible. Matched funding for Manipat and Jampa Ling was raised by Melbourne’s very active Tibet Welfare Group and Artists for Human Rights in Brisbane.

The current project at Bir and Chaundra settlements three hours north of Dharamsala has just sunk two borewells and built 160 toilets. This is the first sanitation the community of 4,000 people has ever received in 30 years. FPMT and AusAID provided the majority of the funding for this work, the rest being provided by the Tibetan Government and the local community. FPMT’s funds came from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who offered to various projects the offerings made to him during his Australian visit in 1996.

We sent our volunteer project officer, Sheridan Lacey, to do a site report at Bir. She came back with the human stories of the difficulties of mothers with babies at hip, taking them to toilet on open filthy ground where cobras lurk in summer and new infections every wet season. “Thank you for our water and toilets,” they repeated over and over. Each toilet was personally decorated by its two sharing families. Skin infections and diarrheal conditions account for half the diseases in Tibetan settlements.

But it is getting incredibly hard to find funding – all overseas aid agencies are experiencing this. To make matters worse for the Tibetans, Save the Children Foundation UK, for many years the Department of Health’s major sponsor, has ceased that arrangement due to strategic redeployment.

This year, through my position as Director/Overseas Aid for FPMT Australia Ltd., I turned to our own community of students for the first time, sending a newsletter and pay slip around the Australian centers. We received less than $2,000 in return, for which we sincerely thank those who gave, but it is not enough. So now I am bringing the matter to our international community.

There is no doubt Western students of Tibetan Buddhism have a special love and gratitude towards the Tibetan people and are also very willing to put their hands into their pockets for them. Every center is rich with opportunities to donate to any number of excellent programs involving Tibetans, most popularly, individual sponsorship of Sangha members.

Traditionally monks and nuns in Tibet were supported by their families who provided food, clothing, firewood, blankets and anything else the person might require. The monastery provided tea during sponsored pujas and not much else. The result of this was that some lived very well and others nearly starved to death. Geshe Rabten Rinpoche has written about how very poor, ill-fed and cold he was as a young monk.

When Tibetan monks first met Westerners in the early 1970s, the “rich Injies” naturally wanted to help, and sponsorship flourished. Lama Yeshe knew very well how the monastic system worked and encouraged sponsorship of individual Kopan monks, but when the money came in it was always pooled.

Many geshes in the West have dutifully established sponsorship programs for the monks belonging to their own khamtsens – monastic hostels. While this can only be considered a very good thing, especially as the khamtsens receive many new arrivals, it is also true that those khamtsens which do not have an Injie connection do not receive any of these funds. So even to this day you still find well-maintained khamtsens with their own shower blocks and healthy well-nourished monks right next to khamtsens with the barest necessities. Nunneries are generally several steps behind monasteries in development.

Our own lamas went for the big picture: Lama Yeshe was a leading sponsor of the Sera Je Assembly Hall and Lama Zopa Rinpoche founded the Sera Food Fund, which supplements the diet of everyone, without discrimination. Lama Yeshe also pointedly asked the students to sponsor Western Sangha, saying the Tibetans had their own culture but often Western Sangha members had nobody. It is not popular to sponsor Western Sangha.

Well over ten years ago I “acquired” my first Tibetan, a layman with a sick wife and young family. I felt honored to be able to give them something and conscientiously saved and went without to do so. A few years ago I was in their settlement and dropped in, to find this man now had two houses and his children had completed tertiary education. His wife was now very well. But he only ever told me tales of great hardship.

I could see he was embarrassed to be busted and on his wall I saw photos of other Westerners I knew who it turned out were also sponsoring this family. My photo wasn’t there – perhaps my A$300 or so a year wasn’t enough.

It is not uncommon for Westerners to sponsor what they rather patronizingly call “my Tibetan,” to continue paying for years and never disengage out of some kind of sentimentality with the small price of a Losar card and maybe a photo. When I told “my Tibetan” that I was happy to see he no longer needed my small donation, I never received another Losar card.

I feel there is a lot of money from Westerners going into what I call “the white envelope trade,” which, given the pressing demand of new arrivals and unfashionable causes – such as water and sanitation projects – the generous students should perhaps rethink. My experience is not an isolated incident: an officer of the Tibetan government told me a story of Westerners who insisted on sending a regular stipend to “their” Tibetans, utterly unheeding of his advice that these families were now quite wealthy and their donation paid for approximately one dozen bottles of foreign beer.

I feel very proud of the water and sanitation projects we have completed in the name of our gurus, Lama Yeshe, Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Lama Tenzin Osel Rinpoche. His Holiness the Dalai Lama constantly exhorts Westerners to do social welfare work, give direct help and truthfully, our projects must have saved many, many lives, especially those of small children.

But now I have to find more money or give up. I have a strong intuition the money I’m looking for is that which is currently being misdirected through the white envelope trade. Let me assure I do not think sponsorship of individuals is a bad thing. I just think some of it has become irrelevant – and no one knows how much money is actually involved because of the privacy of the arrangements.

The other reason I might have to stop is that my karma to be able to do this work may be over. However, I leave behind me FPMT Australia Ltd.’s Company Secretary Wendy White, who is now truly expert in the relevant procedures, and Sheridan who can do the site work. Given funding, we can continue to bring clean water and practical sanitation to the settlements.

When were you last without your usual water and sanitation facilities? Was it inconvenient, annoying, unhealthy or life-threatening? Were very old people or new babies involved? How long did it endure – two days, two weeks, ten years? Please, consider.