By MEA ANDREWS
MISSOULA – A Tibetan nun who now lives in Western Montana has undertaken a new project to help the country she left behind. At her side are Montana friends and Buddhists who want to help.
Tsering Wangmo, of Arlee, who escaped Tibet by walking across the Himalayas, has raised enough money to purchase a building in Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, that she hopes will become a teaching and learning medical clinic and temple.
The building was to be a home for a wealthy family, but the family decided not to finish it, she said.
“She got on the phone and in one week, raised $180,000 to buy the building,” said a friend and supporter, Georgia Milan, a physician who practices in Florence.
Organizers are now planning a fund-raiser in Missoula to help pay for finishing and furnishing the building, buying supplies and launching a startup fund to open the clinic next year.
“She’s very committed to helping Tibet,” Milan said. “She’s had this dream that this could not only be a medical clinic, but that it also could be a center for Buddhism.”
Wangmo and other project supporters envision a center that would serve several purposes, especially as a clinic of Tibetan medicine for the country’s people. China’s authoritarian one-party rule over Tibet has meant exile or death to tens of thousands of Tibetans, and traditional medicine has been replaced by Chinese clinics, Wangmo said.
Tibetans, given some of the lowest-paid jobs in the country, can’t afford the Chinese clinics, and no public or free heath care exists, said Toni McOmber, another friend of Wangmo’s and an organizer of the fund-raiser. Monks and nuns who carried much of the medical knowledge of the country have been banned or killed, so the traditional knowledge once passed down is now threatened, according to the organizers.
“It sounds so odd that we’re taking Tibetan medicine back to Tibet,” Milan said. “But the need in Tibet is very, very great, and the people are very, very poor.”
Doctors trained in traditional U.S. medicine are embracing the ways of older countries like Tibet, Milan said. She hopes they will travel to Tibet to stay at the center, sharing with local residents and doctors what they know while learning from the Tibetan people and practitioners, too.
“There are so many health care providers who would love to go to Tibet, to work in a Tibetan clinic, to tour the country and to learn,” she said. “Tibetans not only have great scholars, but they have much to teach us about living, about dying, about the search for true happiness.”
“There’s a big, integrated-medicine movement here right now,” Milan continued. “We need to be using medicine from all over the world.”
Tibetans and Buddhists integrate the wellness of the mind, body and spirit along with the scientific understanding of disease, she said.
Wangmo and friends will cook Tibetan food for the April 30 fund-raiser, and donations for the auction are still being collected.
