This is Jamyang.

We met him while walking around McLaud Ganj looking for monastaries to invite to do the Hearts of the World project.

He offered to help us find a group of teenage monks. We got together for a tea and I listened intently as he told us his story. JamYang had survived the long and dangerous trek over the Himalayas to escape from a desperate and worsening situation in Tibet.

At age 9, his parents sold him to a farmer and for three years he toiled alone at his farm without pay or enough food to eat.

Starving and weak, he stole money from the man’s house to buy food. Eventually he was caught and explained to the man that he needed some kind of food or payment in order to survive. The man’s responded by beating him horribly. He escaped the farm and traveled to his home to ask his parents if it was true that they had sold him. He couldn’t believe they would do such a thing.

Upon arriving home and seeing his parents again after three years, they told him that he should go back to the farm, they confirmed that it was true, they had sold him. He never returned to the farm, but left his family once again and spent his days sleeping under bridges and his nights breaking into houses to try to get food or money in order to survive. Once, as he was trying to enter someone’s house, he collapsed from weakness at the door. He woke up to find himself inside the house.

A motherly woman asked him why he was sleeping at her doorstep as she served him a tea. He lived with her for awhile until he decided he wanted to escape Tibet to join the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. She loaned him enough money to pay a guide to make the journey across the snow capped Himalayas.

At fifteen years old JamYang traveled over the mountains with three other Tibetans. They slept in the day and traveled by moonlight in order to dodge the patrolling Chinese soldiers who’s only task was to locate and imprison escapees.

They subsisted on dried food and berries from the forest and faced many dangers along the way. Many others who made the same trek died of frostbite, or were killed by Chinese soldiers, or nomads. A well known danger of this “underground railroad” was an insect known to burrow into the skin and create huge holes in its victims bodies which would cause them to bleed to death.

photo courtesy of himalayas.com

After fifteen days and nights, Jamyang arrived to safety in Nepal, but was in terrible shape. He recovered slowly and began work in a kitchen to make back the money he borrowed from woman who had helped him pay for his guide. He sent her the money, saved up a little extra and finally made his way to Dharamsala where he lives now and studies as a monk.

My eyes welled up with tears no less than four times as Jamyang told us of his struggle. He didn’t talk to his parents for over ten years, and hasn’t seen his family since he left. He feels great anger toward them for abandoning him and selling him into slavery. He also feels great longing, for his mother’s love. Telling his story naturally brings up a lot of painful memories for him. I felt like going back to my hotel room to cry for awhile after hearing it. The Chinese destruction of Tibet has caused so much irreversible pain and trauma in the Tibetan psyche.

Jamyang managed to help us set up a workshop at the Dalai Lama’s school, Tibetan Children’s Village. We will go tomorrow to see what lies in the hearts of these young monks.