Tibetan Foothold

Those who have read Dervla Murphy's Full Tilt will know that at the end of her journey she had reached Delhi, in India. Having travelled by bicycle from Ireland, in an amazing show of determination, she then volunteered to work (under the auspices of Save the Children) in a refugee camp for the many Tibetan children displaced by the Chinese actions. The refugee camp (one of many) was in Dharamsala, and it was no coincidence that that was also the home of the Dalai Lama in exile. It was the Dalai Lama's sister who ran the refugee camp.

Her second book, this is somewhat different to the many Dervla Murphy books I have read, in that the travel (some of which occurs in the latter part of the book) is secondary. She describes in great detail the trials and tribulations of the camp: the external politics, the internal politics, the personalities, the roles, the many hardships and shortages, the corruption and siphoning off of aid, the education and medical programmes, but most of all she paints an incredibly compassionate picture of the Tibetan people. At the time of her arrival, there were 1100 children in the camp, which she described as comfortably housing 300.

It is Dervla Murphy, after all, so the picture she paints is warts and all. She has never been one to pull a punch or keep herself quiet when she has an opinion to share, and I think this is what I like about reading her books. I expect she would drive me mad within 2 minutes in real life, should I be lucky enough to cross paths with her, but respect her for the honesty and robustness of her assessments.

Initially the camp was not only catering to children either separated from their parents or orphans, as you might expect. Also in the camp were children both voluntarily placed there by parents who found work (mostly on road building gangs), or involuntarily, children who were removed from their parents and placed in the camp. Over the period of four months that she was full time in the camp, there was a change and it was finally recognised that the children were better off left with the parents than in the overcrowded camp. Child numbers were reduced partly because of this.

There was a passage, which I can't locate now where Murphy was stating that she had no formal qualifications or experience to help - she had no medical training, little experience with children, no teacher training... but as usual she got stuck in. One thing did decided to make a concerted effort on was ear infections. A terribly disproportionate number of children suffered from ear infections, and she made it part of her routine to treat these, and reported excellent results when her time for departure came.

After her formal 4 month placement, she was determined to assist with some information gathering, and set out on her trusty bicycle to visit a number of the Tibetan camps set up for the road building crews in Himachal Pradesh, cycling from camp to camp, village to village, taking statistical counts of parents (approximately) and children (precisely), to build up a census of Tibetans in India. What uses or outcomes with the data are not divulged.

Interestingly Murphy meets the Dalia Lama (the 14th, and current) early in her time there (1963), and was not overly impressed - “though unfortunately he showed no sign of an intellectual ability equal to the enormous task of solving their present problems.” Thankfully on meeting him again later she formed a much more positive view - “He seems to have matured a great deal in that brief time and to have gained in self-assurance, as though he has at last been able to come to terms with his strange situation. The impression I had today was of an astute young statesman in the making...”

4 stars