nwasianweekly.com
Mar. 15, 2008

Photo provided by Michelle Kleisath

The women of Shem Women’s Group

On generosity: the work of Shem Women’s Group of Tibet

By Michelle Kleisath

Northwest Asian Weekly

From 2003 until 2007, I lived in what to some is Qinghai province, China, and to others is Amdo, Eastern Tibet, where I taught sociology at a provincial university and co-founded Shem Women’s Group (www.shemgroup.org), a non-governmental organization dedicated to empowering Tibetan women. “Shem” means charity and compassion in Amdo Tibetan. Shem focuses on increasing the well-being of people in impoverished communities by providing access to basic needs such as water, fuel, electricity, health care and basic education. The organization, led by and for Tibetan women, fulfills its mission by training educated Tibetan women to design, implement and manage sustainable grassroots development projects that will successfully alleviate the problems that their communities face. I lived and worked with this incredible group of Tibetan women for four years, and would like to share here what I learned about generosity during my time with them.

In Tibet, I began to understand that there is no universal good or bad, or even a universal notion of love or its proper expression. One great example of this thrilling cultural values transformation was the generosity I encountered — a kind of generosity that I did not previously know human beings were capable of. This is not to say that generosity does not exist where I was raised on the West Coast of the U.S., or that Americans are comparatively miserly. We are not, a fact that is strongly confirmed for me each time I hold a fundraiser for Shem Women’s Group.

Instead, it is to say that a completely different kind of generosity exists in Tibet, and had I not experienced it myself, I would not have known it was possible.

I traveled with my mother to Banma, Golok, in the summer of 2004. We went to Banma to participate in the implementation of the very first Shem group project — solar electricity generating panels for Garima village. We traveled with the project manager Tashitso, my student and a member of our newly formed NGO, to her nomadic village in the rolling hills of Golok.

We were guests of Tashitso’s distant relatives, and we enjoyed our dinner of mutton, wild Tibetan yams, yak butter and rice by the light of dim yak butter candles. They lived in a yak hair tent and survived off the land, with little or no cash income. They had a difficult life, eking out a living off of their yak and sheep herds. After three wonderful days in the village, it came time for us to leave.

Upon our farewell, our hosts emerged from their tent smiling, arms laden with gifts. I had grown accustomed to the generous gift-giving, and I wasn’t surprised by the gifts held out to us until I saw the look of pain on Tashitso’s face. Our hosts held in their arms several yards of beautiful blue silk and enough brand-new wool for two full-length Tibetan robes. The gift givers themselves wore torn, ragged robes that they had owned many years. The gift had cost them probably more than a year of work, and losing it would no doubt cause them a fair amount of physical suffering. But they gave it with a freedom and a joy that I have simply never experienced in the U.S.

I looked over at Tashitso for a cue as to how to act, and when I saw the tears well up in her eyes, I knew it would be a battle.

She gently took the fabric from my arms and thrust it back at the father. “It’s too much; we cannot accept it,” she said forcefully in Tibetan. Although it is common in many Tibetan areas to reject a gift and insist that the giver take it back, there was something different about this situation. There was desperation in Tashitso’s voice, and tears were now streaming down her cheeks. She knew that if they gave us this fabric, they wouldn't have new clothing for a year or more.

My mother and I backed away, ensuring that the clothing would not be thrust back upon us. Tashitso fought for nearly 10 minutes and was sobbing by the time she escaped, having run away after he finally gave in and let the fabric come to rest in the crook of his arm.

Most likely, I will never fully understand what happened that day in Garima, but it was one of the most profound experiences of my young life. It is now impossible for me to go on subscribing to the very sensible idea that we humans will take care of ourselves first before we can even think about giving to others, for I now know that it is possible to give everything when you have nothing.

Now I am a graduate student in anthropology here at the University of Washington, and on March 21, I will join my Shem colleague Pagbatso and documentary photographer Madeleine Graham Blake at the UW Ethnic and Cultural Center Theatre in presenting a slideshow featuring Shem’s work. I extend an invitation to the readers of Northwest Asian Weekly in the hopes that we can all exercise our own special kind of generosity in supporting the work of the amazing young Tibetan women of Shem.

Shem Women’s Group: Empowering Tibetan Woman, UW Ethnic Cultural Center, 3931 Brooklyn Ave, N.E., Seattle, 7-9 p.m. Free. Call 206-543-4635.

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