Sanjiang area investigation

The following is a translation from a Chinese link of a friend of Zheng SiSi (Cici), Hong Bo, who is the leader of the organization Ge Sang Hua (named after a common flower in Tibet). Ge Sang Hua organizes education-related support for Tibetan children. This post was written a few days ago about Hong Bo's trip to Yushu in Qinghai province to visit sponsored children, this May.



This photo is of a mother and child. You might not be able to imagine how they are suffering. The mother's voice box has been destroyed so she cannot speak clearly. When we visited her family she became distressed because she was unable to explain the family's situation to us. She has no husband, and her daughter no father.



When the mother opened her coat, we saw that she had two raw horrific sores on her leg. Despite her vocal disability, she was able to communicate that she had no idea what had caused the open sores, and had no money to seek medical care.

I couldn't bear seeing any more, I doubled over as if my heart had been cut in two. The only thing I am able to do for this small family is to record their story and publish it on our website. The daughter we sponsor is the one hope and joy that keeps the mother strong and alive.



Next, we visited another sponsored child's family. All three generations of women have lost their husbands to the various effects of poverty. The child we are financing and his mother live a bitter and hard life. The grandmother is elderly and trembling from sickness and the mother's children are still young and in school. The mother has never had a father-figure; she has never been to school and she has no husband. In this area, many single women raising families often leave government forms void of the children's father's names, rejecting the possibility of child-support preferring to bear the hardship of raising a child on one's own because the possibility that the child could belong to different men looms dauntingly. In this manner, many of the children we sponsor have no "official" fathers.


This is not unusual in Tibetan culture. In many Tibetan songs, most lyrics praise mothers but seldom fathers. I believe Tibetan women suffer more than we, Han people, can imagine. We cannot compare their strength and endurance of hardship to our own lives.

Tibet is such a beautiful and mysterious land. We believe that the lives of the children Ge Sang Hua sponsors will be much happier than their mothers' and grandmothers'. We know knowledge and education change change children's futures for the better. We hope for your prayers, thoughts, efforts and support.