Tibetan Foster Home & Orphanage

Some people have asked to pay me for making the guided meditations available. I do not personally want any payment, but thought that anyone who is inspired could make a donation to this severely underfunded Tibetan foster home and orphanage that I came across on my most recent trip to Yushu, Tibet. The Yushu orphanage was first established by a Tibetan man named Dawa, who went immediately to Yushu by bus to help people affected during the earthquake in 2009. In the above picture—with the children wearing second-hand traditional Tibetan outfits at a picnic organized—Dawa is on the far right end and a local Lama, who also tries to support the home, is in the middle. While I visited the orphanage, I saw pictures of Dawa and his friends literally pulling some of these children out of the rubble. Since 2009, the home he established has also accumulated even more “foster” children, who were either abandoned or mistreated by their parents. Although the Chinese government offers some small financial support for those children orphaned by the quake, it does not support these foster children, because it claims that the delinquent parents are responsible for them and must (somehow) be made to pay—which is, of course, impossible to enforce. So although Dawa himself has his own family that he struggles to support financially, he has supported them with his own money, time, and effort, and whenever possible, tried to raise other donations.  Caring for the Yushu home is not always easy, since Dawa himself lives 18 hours by car in the Ganze prefecture. Dawa would move the orphans closer to his own family where he could more easily look out for them, but Chinese laws prevent him from taking them away from the area where they were born.  Despite the distance, he personally does their shopping for bulk dry foods and clothing whenever it is needed—which he hopes is only once every six weeks but sometimes is more often. Even though he has receive some donations, the home barely has enough money to pay a cook to prepare the children’s meals three times per day. The only other care that the children have is an unpaid volunteer caretaker, who visits each evening to see that the kids do their homework, do their prayers, and get to bed.  If Dawa has any money left over after paying their food, he saves it for the children’s various medical needs. For instance, one of the girls was recently bitten in the face by a vicious dog and the dog’s teeth pierced her nasal passage making it hard for her to breathe. So Dawa drove her over 30 hours each direction on bad roads to the hospital two provinces away, because it was the only place to get the expert medical help they needed.  When he went to that hospital, he also decided to take with him another girl, whose scalp had been burnt so badly as a baby during the earthquake that she has had to wear a baseball cap her whole life (see her picture below left with baseball hat removed). His idea was to see whether she could get plastic surgery or a hair transplant. In the end, he only had enough money to pay the bills for the girl with the dog bite, and ended up buying the other girl a wig instead (see picture below right with new wig).

When I visited the orphanage, I could tell that whatever Dawa does is purely out of compassion and his knowledge that nobody else will step forward to care for these children. He takes nothing for his own overhead and acts purely in the interest of the children however he can.  Recently, Dawa has been looking for a piece of land near the children, where he can build a small greenhouse for them, so that they can grow vegetables for themselves to supplement their diets which are dominated by starches with little to no vegetable or protein.

I have not yet set up the above “donate” button to collect donations on their behalf. So, in the meantime, please just let me know if you are interested in contributing to this charity. Some other more recent pictures of the orphanage are posted below.