Yeshi Dhondup
aged 21, at Sera Jey Monastery in Bylakuppe, India on
Sunday, September 24, 2005.
Interpretation by Lobsang Tsultrim.
Print Version

I was born in 1985 in the Kanze District of Kham in eastern Tibet, in the village of Chitzanha. My parents were farmers and nomads. From my childhood on, I never had a chance to study. I spent my time taking care of grazing cattle, and it was impossible to study. My village was quite small. There were 32 houses in my village. My parents only had two children, me and one sister. When I was 12 years old, my father died. After my sister grew old enough to do so, she got married. Then I decided to become a monk.

In 1998, my family decided to send me to India. Before I departed, my mother's relatives came to our home and held something like a party. Everybody became very sad, and cried, because I was leaving, and they probably wouldn't see me again. My brother—not a sibling, but a cousin—came with me to Lhasa. There in Lhasa I had another cousin. People said that if we went without permission that I would suffer, and perhaps die.

In Lhasa, there are two types of passports. One is for traveling from Lhasa to Kathmandu in Nepal, and gives permission to the bearer to go outside of Tibet. There is another kind which can only be used from Lhasa to Drom on the border with Nepal, and cannot be used to leave the country. It took more than five months to get this passport, the one that is only good to go to the border from Lhasa. My brother sent me with a friend of his who was a businessman. He sold precious timber that could be used for high quality furniture and things like that. There were many people in our group, including a girl from Lhasa. Everybody except for me and this girl had a passport that allowed them go outside of the country.

When we reached Drom, we stayed there for two days to find a Nepali guide to help us cross the border. My brother's friend helped to search for a guide. He had another friend at Drom who made an appointment for us to meet the guide. There were five of us, including an elderly nun, a woman from Lhasa, and two young men from Kham, and me. Those who had the passport for leaving had already departed, but none of the people from Kham had this passport for leaving China. The girl from Lhasa stayed in a separate room. Then a woman came and sent for us. She brought us to another room where we were served tea and something to eat, and we stayed there until twelve o'clock. Then three Nepalis arrived and they talked to the guide. They took all of our belongings—our luggage, and whatever food we had brought with us.

For that region, Drom is a big town. It's a hill station, so people have to climb down the steep slope of a mountain, and at the bottom is a large river, which marks the border between China and Nepal. We had to go around a long way to avoid being seen by the Chinese policemen. It was exactly two o'clock in the morning. We waited for the night watchman to go to bed so that we could cross the bridge. We waited a long time, but he never went to sleep. Instead, the guards were changed, and somebody was there patrolling all the time.

Then the guide heard footsteps coming our way, and screamed a muffled scream at us to go quickly, so we started running. After a short time, the elderly nun couldn't keep up, and she grabbed me and held on, pulling me back, and begging me to please wait for her. She pulled back on my coat, but I pulled away and ran as fast as I could, leaving my coat behind. After running for a long time, I reached a place that looked like a bus stand. Because at home I had spent much time in the mountains with the grazing cattle, I was quite a fast runner. At this bus stand, there were many buses waiting. I heard a strange sound, and saw my guide hiding there, so I went and joined him. Then we heard sounds, and saw that the old nun and the other Khampa boys were being chased by Chinese policemen, and were trying to run away.

After about fifteen minutes, we knew that the others had been caught—we could hear it. So after about half an hour we left our hiding place and continued our journey. We reached a small village in Nepal, and the guide knocked on a door. The door opened, and there were some people there waiting for us. The light was turned on, and we entered the house. After seeing us, they then turned off the light. We stayed there for one night. I was terrified. These Nepalese people were very strong and fierce-looking, and were quite crude. So the whole night instead of sleeping I did a special exercise, because I was so afraid of them. I thought they might kill me. So I didn't get any sleep.

At six o'clock, I was told by one of the guides who could speak a little bit of Tibetan that I should stay there, and that he would go back and check on what happened to the other members of our group. Then, after locking me in the room, the others also went away. I stayed there for quite a long time. This room didn't have any windows. I could hear nothing but the sounds of pigs and chickens. I became hungry, and at twelve o'clock, a man came and offered me water using hand signals, but I had to pay him more than 3,000 Nepali rupees for one cup of water.

At one o'clock, all of the guides came back and told me that I should go. They said that they would follow me, coming after me, but that I should go ahead alone. I had to go down the road. On the way I met a Chinese policeman. I was afraid of him, but I did my best not to be afraid, and not to look like I was afraid of him. So I walked straight ahead, but the policeman stared at me carefully and approached me. He asked me where I was going. I told him that I was a servant, and I was going for some supplies. He didn't believe me. After telling me I was from Amdo and not a local boy, he beat me, striking me several times. Then he took me back to the village where I had been the night before, near the bridge. Then another policeman took me to another place where there was a big prison. I was put into this prison, where there were many Tibetan prisoners. There were both Chinese policemen and Tibetan policemen. They told me to remove all my possessions, my luggage and also the precious things I was wearing around my neck. Then I was put in a cell, with some other Tibetan people. One of them was a girl who came from the same area as my home in Kham. She had come from India and was caught coming back into Tibet and was arrested.

There were eleven people in the cell I shared. Most of them were Khampas like me, from Kham originally. Like this girl, they had been caught trying to sneak back into Tibet from India. Also there in the cell were most of the other people from the group I had tried to sneak into Nepal with the previous night. The girl was screaming because I had been keeping her money for her, and the guards had taken it from me. The elderly nun was not there, however. I learned from the others that after paying more than twenty thousand Nepali rupees as a bribe to the Chinese, she had been allowed to enter India. I also heard that she had relatives there in Drom, and they had helped her to make this deal with the Chinese.

I was kept there for more than a week. Then one day I was taken from the cell, and was asked where I had been going. I told them that I was going to Nepal, because I had an uncle there who was very old and needed some help, and I was going to meet him. The Chinese policeman had taken all my precious belongings, including a photograph of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and a photograph of my father which I had inside of a little thing like a box that usually includes a little statue of the Buddha. I asked them to give me back the photograph of my father. The Chinese policeman then took a photograph of all of us, and gave us back our belongings. Then we were sent back to Lhatse, in a district not too far from the border.

There we were forced to do manual labor, mostly cutting wood for the Chinese officials to keep themselves warm. We stayed there in Lhatse for quite a long time. Then they told us we had to move on from Lhtase to Shigatse. There was only one policeman to accompany us, but he carried a gun. They told us that if any of us tried to escape from him that he would kill us, and that they would not be responsible for it. We probably could have escaped if we tried, but none of us did.

There were around five hundred prisoners there in Shigatse. Most of us were younger than those prisoners, who were mostly around thirty years old. Those who were above fourteen years old were kept with the older prisoners, the adults, and those fourteen years old or younger were kept in a separate facility. Both of these prisons were only for men. Not long after that we were taken to another prison called Tiri which was quite far from Shigatse, and was quite large. Before we were assigned a cell, our measurements were taken. Depending upon your height, you could be kept in this prison. Actually I was too young for this prison, and I was not tall enough for their guidelines, but they kept me there anyway.

We were beaten very severely in this prison. With me, they didn't use any weapons, only their hands and fists and feet, but the beatings were severe. I had been beaten before coming to this prison, but not this badly. Then one day my cousin arrived to see me. He had been searching for me, and somehow had located me. He brought one of my old travel documents with him that had a photograph of me, and asked everyone he met if they had seen me. So one policeman called for me and told me that my cousin was there, and I was allowed to meet with him. I felt very sad that I was meeting my cousin under these circumstances. He told me that I was too young for this prison and that he was going to speak to the authorities about this situation. He was able to convince the authorities that this was true, so I was brought back to Shigatse again. My cousin also followed me to Shigatse and tried to get me released by offering a bribe to the Chinese authorities. My cousin had a female relative there in Shigatse who knew some of the authorities there quite well, so she passed the bribe on to them and I was released. It had now been about a month since I had first been caught.

After being released, I returned to Lhasa. About two months later, I tried again to escape to India. I had managed to keep the old travel document that allowed me to go as far as the border with Nepal, and it had not yet expired. My cousin arranged another guide for me. Again I came to Drom.

This time, the new guides—there were two of them—took me up from Drom instead of down. We climbed way up to a big forest. We hid during the day and only moved at night. This time it was better. These guides could both speak Tibetan quite well, and I was not part of a group, there were just the two guides and I. When we got through this forest, we arrived in a small village where the guides had some acquaintances. We stayed there for one night, and the next day we continued our journey. We arrived at a very isolated place where there was a big cave. They left me there for a full day while they left to go attend to some of their own business. One had to attend his brother's wedding, and the other said he had some work to do. I was very afraid and felt very lonely. Then finally at six o'clock in the evening, one of the guides returned for me and took me down into the valley where we reached a place near the main road.

From there, we had to crawl a long distance. If any lights or vehicles came along, we had to stop crawling and hide. We crawled and hid, crawled and hid. Finally, we reached a bridge. There was a Nepali policeman guarding the bridge, and since I didn't have a passport, we couldn't cross over the bridge. If the Nepali policeman were to catch me, he would turned me over to the Chinese authorities. Instead, we had to climb along underneath the bridge. We had to be careful not to fall, it was a very long drop to a large river, and it would have been very dangerous. It was a long and slow job, and we finally reached the other side safely at about five o'clock in the morning. We were in Nepal.

There was a bus stand there where we could catch a bus to Kathmandu. Once we arrived there, I went to the Refugee Reception Centre. I had one relative in Kathmandu, so I divided my time in Kathmandu between staying with the center and staying with my relative. Once I had finally obtained all the necessary documents for admission to the school here in India I was sent to India by the reception center, and finally reached the school here at the Sera Jey Monastery in Bylakuppe, in the south of India. That was six years ago, in 1999.

I traveled by bus from Kathmandu to Delhi, which took about three days. From Delhi, our small group traveled on to Dharamsala, to the north in Himachal Pradesh. I stayed at the reception center there, and had a good meeting with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. There were more than three hundred new arrivals in Dharamsala from Tibet. We all had a very good meeting with His Holiness, who greeted each of us very warmly.

Then we returned to Delhi, and took the train to Bangalore. From Bangalore, we traveled by bus to Sera Jey. Each new arrival has to be assigned to a "khantzen", a division which is usually based on where you come from in Tibet. Even though I was a little older than most of the students, my house master decided to send me to school here at the Sera Jey Secondary School because I had no education at all from my time in Tibet. I was old enough for the main monastery but not at all prepared to join in the studies there. I was too old for joining the first class, where I probably belonged, so I had to join the third class. Fortunately, there were many new arrivals with no education like me, so they formed a special third class for us. I didn't know anything. I didn't even know the Tibetan language. I could speak Tibetan, but I didn't know any written Tibetan at all. I had no education whatsoever. So I worked very hard in my studies, and I did well. Now I am in class nine.

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