By MELISSA WIDNER
NEWTON COUNTY — If the work is done for a higher purpose, it can become an act of worship.
Just ask the group of walkers who passed through Newton County this weekend on their way to the Chinese Consulate in Chicago to draw attention to the 48-year occupation of Tibet by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.
“This is one of the hardest times of the year and we wanted to feel a little pain so we can realize people are really suffering in Tibet,” said Tseringdhon Dup, 31, of Indianapolis.
Dup was one of a handful of walkers who passed through Kentland Sunday morning as part of the “Indy to Windy” peace walk organized by the International Tibet Independence Movement, a not-for-profit group based out of Fishers, Ind.
As some members broke off for presentations in nearby churches or schools, a core group of walkers kept up the grueling pace of up to 30 miles a day, rain or shine, come cold, blisters, or sore muscles.
“A lot of people in other parts of the country don’t know where Tibet is or what the problems are, so we’re trying to bring the story to them,” said Dup, whose parents were among the hundreds of housands who fled Tibet because they opposed or feared the Chinese communist rule.
“My dad was thrown in prison. He escaped from there,” said Dup, who was born in India. “They said it was really hard. They had to walk two months from Tibet to Nepal and from Nepal to India.
“It was really snowy and dad said a lot of people died on the road. They had to sleep in caves and they had to move at night because the Chinese security patrols were looking for them.”
Dup said he came to the United States as a tourist five years ago and discovered settlements of Tibetan refugees living in places from New York to central Indiana.
“A lot of people from Tibet are living here,” he said. “I decided to stay and join the cause.”
The cause, according to the group’s website (http://www.rangzen.org/) is to educate the public through non-violent means, such as the walk, and to encourage financial pressure such as boycotting Chinese goods.
Through financial and international pressure from groups such as the United Nations, the group believes they can win the country’s independence.
“For the last 50 years it has been under Chinese control and the rest of the world has ignored it like nothing happened, said Tenzin Jamyang, 32, of Chicago, also an India-born child of Tibetan refugees.
“There is scary stuff going on there. All the things people were worried about with the Nazis are happening in Tibet today: forced labor, torture, destroying a culture.
“I couldn’t close my eyes and say, ‘Okay I make money so it’s okay,’ when our own people are suffering every day.” Native New Yorker Douglas Herman, 30, became involved with the group after he spent part of the summer of 2002 touring Asia and Europe.
“I got the feeling the Tibetan culture I was seeing was contrived for the benefit of the tourist dollars.”
Around the religious center of Lhasa, along a path the monks walk for meditation, Herman said, “Ninety-five percent of the businesses selling to tourists were Chinese-owned.
“At night all I heard was Chinese go-go karaoke bars. You couldn’t sleep.”
The more he learned about the situation, he said, the more he became motivated to get involved.
“All the educational opportunities there are in Chinese. The illiteracy rate there is appalling, but the literacy rates of Tibetan exiles is 99 percent.”
Herman said Tibetans living in the United States have been examples of the melting pot Americans cherish.
“Some cultural groups come to the United States, form into their pockets, and don’t embrace our culture. The Tibetan community assimilates on their own. “I had a landlady in Sunset Park in New York who would yell at us every day in Chinese. She never did learn to speak English. I know Tibetan immigrants who know more English than some 10-year-old Americans.”
Along the route, which started at Monument Circle in Indianapolis on Nov. 30 and will end outside the Chinese Consulate in Chicago on Friday, the walkers have given presentations on Tibet at high schools and churches.
Herman, who on Sunday drove the sag wagon for the group, distributing tea and bread every few hours, said the process has been a matter of patience and not giving up.
“We basically make a bunch of cold calls, and of maybe nine calls we’ll get one yes.”
On Monday, Herman said schools in the Newton County area had turned the group down, declining to get involved in “something political.”
Undeterred, the group spoke at Cedar Lake and Merrillville high schools on Tuesday instead. Herman said the group takes heart at how open teenagers are to learning about the rest of the world.
“As we’ve been walking, we see car after car, and it will be an older person and a kid, and the kid will be hanging out the window watching us, and you can just see the conversation when he turns and asks what this is about and the person driving has no idea.
“Our goal is so that when that kid is the one driving and the kid asks the question, they have the answers.”
At the high schools, he said, the students have asked pointed questions. “They start off, they don’t even know what Tibet is about. It’s amazing to hear people who have never heard about Tibet before ask what’s going to happen when the Dalai Lama dies and why China would want to do this.”
He said the why is easy to answer. “The Chinese have been mining it for 50 years but there are still extensive natural resources in Tibet, huge oil and uranium deposits, gold, silver, timber.
“They’re tapping into sacred lakes to create hydroelectric power.” The country also serves as a physical buffer between China and India, which he said have traditionally been enemies, he said.
Since taking over, Herman said, the Chinese occupation has tried to override the Tibetan culture with their own, including stamping out the Tibetan religion, Buddhism, and kidnapping the country’s second highest religious leader, the Panchen Lama, at age 5, to replace him with their own leader.
Jigme Norbu, 39, has a closer tie to the occupation of his parents’ country. His father’s younger brother is the nation’s highest religious figure, the Dalai Lama, who in 1956, at the age of 15, fled Tibet after his negotiations with the Chinese government failed.
Norbu’s father, Thubten, founded a Tibetan studies program at Indiana University and founded the Tibetan Cultural Center in Bloomington in 1979 to promote the Tibetan values of peace, love, curiosity and non-violence.
The family has also been a strong advocate of a free Tibet.
“It’s a responsibility, not only for me, but for all Tibetans,” said Jigme Norbu, who has taken on the cause from his father in recent years.
“It’s been five decades since they have been under communist rule and right now people are being supressed in Tibet today.
“Through actions such as what we’re doing, the peace walk, which is non-violent and so acceptable and peaceful, we want to get to people’s hearts, even to the Chinese people, to get more awareness and get more people to stand up and listen.”
The group encouraged people to read about Tibet and learn more about the occupation. “Even if one person writes their local representative or senator, that will make a lot of difference,” said Jamyang.
“All we ask is if they don’t help, at least don’t harm,” he said. “Don’t buy Chinese goods,” said Herman. “There’s a chance a Tibetan worker in a forced labor camp made that item.”
The walkers were also trying to raise awareness for Tenzin Delek, a Rinpoche, or Buddhist monk, who is sentenced to die sometime before Jan. 2 by the People’s Republic of China.
The group discounted the PRC’s accusations that Delek took part in a bombing in mainland China.
He was a simple monk. Peace, compassion and love are values that are very precious in the Tibetan community. They are false accusations,” said Pasang, 58, of Chicago.
