2021 in East Tibet.
“When can we visit Surmang?” again and again I was asked by our patrons in Beijing.
2021 was hardly the year in which I could give an optimistic answer. Everything in 2021 was shut down.
When 2021 dawned in China, it was a time of city-wide shut downs, of draconian prohibition of foreign travel in or out of China, of mandatory masks, and the required use of cell phone software that verified one’s location and the health status of all Chinese and all visitors to China. There were no exceptions.
As project managers, we were passing the disaster going the other way. Our goal was to drive the car of clinic project design forward in three directions:
After 30 years at Surmang I could read the handwriting on the wall: Yushu was becoming China’s Bhutan. So 2021 was dedicated to two goals: —meeting international standards of clinical care: not only keeping the clinic open in the face of Covid shut downs, but moving ahead with the renovation of the clinic: a modern toilet, washing machine, shelves and scrubs, new meds storage, kitchen, tiled bathroom with hot water shower. — and guest quarters, the development of a lodge for visitors to Surmang.
The first 6 months of the year was a time when travel in Beijing was somewhat relaxed —meaning we could actually enter a huge Home Depot-type store, where we went ahead and bought: -a complete kitchen with oven and sink and copious counter space and shelves and -a large Panasonic refrigerator -a Japanese tea house, complete with tatami mats and shoji screens.
These were stores were places we were familiar with. In the pre-Covid days they were somewhat bustling, like American big-box stores. This year they were largely empty. With the kitchen interior measurements in hand, I was able to place the order and have the design department come up with the kitchen drawings. The store manager knew well our charity clinic and told me they would support our purchase. The ¥150,000 (US $24,000) kitchen could be ours for ¥100,000 (US $16,000). It was a severe price reduction that included all the design modifications and transportation.
While not an IKEA-style assembly, the parts had to be all coded to be able to fit together. Now I started to wonder about putting in a wall, shoji screens and tatami mats for the bedroom whose walls we’d removed to expand the upstairs.
When I went to visit the company that made such a room, such a tea house, it became clear to me that we should not just put up walls and screens, but tatami mats and shelves. The full monte.
The tea house company, like the big-box retailer, also promised a deep discount. And they made good on their promise. The whole tea house was sold to us for a little over $3500.
Installed. Delivered.
We would install a traditional Japanese tea house in a 100% ethnic Khampa Tibetan region! What made the idea even more ironic was the fact that my own late Buddhist teacher was not just an aficionado of Japanese culture, but a lineage holder in the Sogetsu School of Japanese flower arranging!
II. Surmang in September.
I was worried for a good deal of early 2021. First there were no flights out of Beijing. Then no flights to Xining, Qinghai. Then Yushu Prefecture wherein lies Surmang, was on lockdown. Then just Surmang. By the end of July I began to get indications that we could indeed go in September.
I went with Mikko Lan, a Director of Ogilvy, and with Boon from a UN Women’s foundation. We went for about 10 days. While we were there we assembled the beds, the shower, and the kitchen.
It was a transformation worthy of the most beautiful butterfly. 2022's plan is the addition of 3 bedrooms upstairs is to create a lodge so that when this scourge does end we can accommodate eco- and anthro- tourists (and our Beijing patrons!) to help make the Surmang Clinic sustainable! The icing on the cake will be meeting and clinical rooms downstairs
Now it is 2022. Let’s all plan on meeting at Surmang! Do you drink tea?
Lee
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My daughter iana, was born about 3 months premature, 26 years ago. My wife, Wenjing, had placenta previa and fibroid mayomas , uterine tumors that, as if the prematurity weren’t enough, were threatening my wife’s and baby’s life with fatal hemorrhaging. Thus began my journey with mother and child health.
It was something that neither of us could prepare for. Because of a very great Headmaster at Western Academy of Beijing, Ian Rysdale, Wenjing was air evacuated to the Queen Mary Hospital in Hong Kong, which with its 18 stories, had a one entire floor a pediatric neo-natal care unit. 1 ½ months later, a very tiny Iana Cybele Weingrad was born. And Wenjing was alive to talk about it. iana was named after Ian Rysdale.
Thus my journey with mother and child health began right then and there, with my own lifetime membership in the circle of life.
I began to see these struggles in every small child and every mom, dad, grandpa and grandma in rural China. With our clinic in 4400 m-high rural Tibet, I became sensitized to not only how vulnerable women are there, but how dangerous it is, especially when you don’t live near an urban 18 storey Hospital.
With no private automobile ownership, living on a funky dirt road, on the south side of a 16,000’ mountain pass, 5 or 8 hours away from any hospital, I learned that this is not some freakish rural outlier. It is the norm, precisely the challenge, what every rural Tibetan woman faces, day in , day out, traditionally without midwives, or nearby hospitals. I even came up with a slogan: "if you want to save a culture, save a mother."
It is a very very bad case study of how threatened, un-empowered women, women who until our clinic came along, and how they lived with since time immemorial. It is one where they had to give birth by themselves in the fields with the animals or in the yak bier, and cut their umbilical cord by themselves, with the oldest, rustiest knife available. Unassisted.
It was a ritual that perfectly mirrored the very low status of Tibetan women.
After the birth of our baby, iana, I vowed to do something about them. Now 25 years later, I can boast that we trained our two doctors with over 150 very great volunteers, doctors from Beijing, San Francisco, Vancouver, Colorado, New York. With the help of the American Chamber of Commerce of China, Ogilvy, Siemens and Beijing United Family Hospital we received modern equipment like an autoclave, ultrasound and microscope.
In an area that held among the highest maternal mortality in the world, at 1200 mortalities/100,000 live births, we were able to reduce the MM to zero by 2011.
But we still have a ways to go — our building was aging and not aging well. In the last 6 years we turned all that around fixing
—our leaky roof,
—our clinic floor
—a new ceiling
—a hardwood oak floor
—a modern sanitary shower and toilet
—computers and a printer for the doctors’ offices.
Somehow all of this seemed like problem solving, problem by problem. Then it occurred to me when our patrons in Beijing would ask over and over again, that Surmang was not just some cast-off funky part of Qinghai. No. It is China’s own Bhutan and with the right environment our patrons could come to an exotically beautiful —and holy— part of China but support our work at the same time.
That’s how the idea of a lodge at the clinic was formulated. So this year we installed a new kitchen and with the generosity of a big company here in Beijing, and coverted one of the bedrooms into a Japanese shoji and tatami room, a tea room. Oddly enough we found that the suppliers of these rooms were willing to discount their materials 40%, 50% because they were, like me, inspired to give back to the neediest people in China. Take a look at what donations have done to our clinic. Make mother and child health a sustainable project!
And join our cause!
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We have, since 1988 tried to answer the question: if all life on earth were under threat, and we could through mass interstellar transport, save a significant number of earthlings, who would we save?
It occurred to me that we have attempted to answer that question in the past 30 years. At the head of a line, most people would include Wall St. bankers, politicians, Iowa corn farmers, entertainers, doctors, scientists, and professional athletes. I would put first the common people of East Tibet: the farmers and the nomads and then the monks, nuns and yogis first in line on that rocket ship. Why?
These humble and mainly illiterate people are survivors. And as Covid 19 has taught us, that is no small accomplishment. But beyond mere survival there are other praises we can sing. As few of them would admit in their humility, they carry the culture of vastness, cheerfulness, and most importantly, compassion. In our 30 years of work at Surmang, it is our honor to help revitalize them.
This year we will reach out to other international foundations so that our success can become not just a model of rural health work, but one of an international standards clinic. Our clinic building was the first new construction at Surmang after the disastrous years of 1955 – 1980.
But it wasn’t on barren ground. As Karma Sengay Rinpoche told me in 1991, there are many larger Surmang monasteries than Surmang Dutsi til, but none holier.
Outreach to the Chinese Government.
I’ve tried to follow the example of their late Abbot, Chogyam Trungpa, by not collecting projects but by giving projects away. and embracing anyone willing to help. There were some bad harvests along the way but most, starting with Chinese Ambassador Han in 1986 to the head of the Minority Affairs Council in 1990, to the Qinghai Governors to the head of the Yushu Public Health Bureau, we sought out the partnership with the government in order to see what we could do to help. Our over 5 partnerships with the Chinese government were a bridge not just with China and the Chinese Government, but with foreign leaders seeking to connect with the wisdom of the of the region’s wounded but undying spiritual vitality.
Much of the help was done out of respect for Chogyam Trungpa so much so that we were told in a private audience with the Qinghai Governor, that our philanthropic work was the upaya, the compassion, of the Vidyadhara, Chogyam Trungpa. After all these years, it is very very likely that our clinic is the only international clinic in an ethnic Tibetan region.
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I’m not a young man — so I’ve seen a lot of years. I don’t know what 2021 will bring, but 2020 was as close to a Ray Bradbury novel as I care to get. At the end of January 2020 I went to Hawaii to see my daughter starring in a dance performance at the University of Hawaii, “The Last King of Bali.” Then, I almost couldn’t get back into China, where I live.
Time and again since then I couldn’t get out of our compound where we live —the requirements just to go to the shopping center are draconian. With the various forms of ID, entering the local supermarket itself is like entering a foreign country. Everyone has cell phone software that tracks their movements. It is inconvenient, but then again so is death by Covid-19. Social distancing and pro-active public health management has kept the situation from going from bad to worse in China. With low car use, the skies are as blue as I remember them in my 30 years here.
Fortunately for our clinic in far away Qinghai, on the vast Tibetan plateau, social distancing is a normal part of Tibetan culture and we didn’t have to create any special procedures. But women still get pregnant, babies are born. And that is our foundation’s sweet spot.
2020 was a good time for taking a long look planning our future.
We bought a lot of furniture from IKEA and a big Panasonic washing machine, new beds, convertible sofas, meds cabinets. At the end of the summer a ceiling was installed in the entire first floor. Next time you need to call an electrician just say a prayer of thanksgiving that your home is not in East Tibet! In addition to GlobalGiving.org., our patrons here in China want to visit and I want all of you to also see what good your donations have created. We plan on using the second floor of the clinic as a lodge just for that purpose when we don’t have programs there, such as community health worker training, or visiting doctors providing training. But that will have to wait to later this summer.
You are all invited.
Our 2020 donations were the best since our foundation’s creation in 1988. Please continue your support. Until then, please add your name to our growing mailing list to keep track of our continuing strange and wonderful story, increasing the status of women, saving their lives and those of their babies.
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This year, Surmang Foundation’s Dharma Sagara Clinic is isolated because of Covid-19.
So even the difficult travel to Qinghai Province and then 1500 km south at> 4000 meters, was made impossible due to the shutdown of air travel, not to mention the draconian measures such a social distancing and quarantine. Our Mother and Child programs which started in 2005, have been working well. This year the downstream effects of Covid effectively postponed the start of a second phase, a new health promotion program our foundation wanted to provide in 2020.
Despite our hubris as foreigners, since antiquity the region was also isolated. For Khampa Tibetans, social distancing is a traditional way of life. These peaceful nomadic yak herders, barley farmers and monks and nuns practicing meditation had never seen a foreigner until 1987, the year I arrived. This reason alone —the absence of primary care and mother and child health— ensured the sad reality that only returning visitors were death and disease.
That is, until the Dharma Sagara Clinic. Our clinic’s work was not just a plug-and-play health center, but a gradual elevation of the culture of health, to chip away at the very patterns of life that made having a baby and being a baby a kind of Russian roulette.
This year’s isolation has not impacted regular clinical operations — social distancing is a traditional way of life in this ethnic Khampa Tibetan region. Nor have there been outbreaks of Covid at Surmang. We are still treating about 1000 patients/month. In fact you could say that the last several months we’ve continued our work to the usual: full waiting rooms, pregnant moms, newborn babies, treating diseases like placenta previa, Hepatitis, high blood pressure, emergency medicine and trauma. Soon the snows, in this the Land of Snows, will return and Mother Nature’s winter will once again have the last move in social distancing.
[The Nuns Project]
Back in 2019, 2020 was the year we were to start a public health program among the nuns to eliminate the scourge of h-pylori, hepatitis, and TB. The idea is to eliminate these diseases and then make the nuns agents of change in public health in the Surmang region, since the nuns and monks enjoy very high status among the Khampa Tibetans. To the best of my knowledge, this way of leveraging our status at the Monastery to make the monastics agents of change in the community has never been done before. But this year’s Covid quarantine of foreigners and non Surmang Tibetans made these plans something we’ll have to do next year.
[What can be done?]
So what could we do? We decided to complete the interior, the clinic’s physical improvements. These have been furnishings and improvements such as the installation of a ceiling in every room on the 1st floor. The IKEA furnishings include 7 modern beds, sheets, quilts, pillows, nightstands, lights, cabinets for meds, a play area for children, a convertible sofa, a wingback chair, and finally Hunter-Douglas style window treatments to further insulate the building from the cruel East Tibetan winter. We also put the finishing touches on our new tiled toilet/shower. Last but not least is a washing machine —since water was installed two years ago.
[Wrapping it up]
When the furnishings are installed, we will have a clinic that is unparalleled in terms of function and taste. Although we have much further to go — a kitchen next year— I am very proud of this result so far. It will arouse the confidence and comfort of all guests who stay at the Dharma Sagara Clinic. I’m also hoping that in the future as eco-tourism grows for Surmang, that it will be a place of unparalleled dignity and comfort for those seeking to visit this extraordinary place. Please come!
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