Free The Waiting Land by Dervla Murphy

and mud houses situated at the western end of the airstrip. Here Kay lives, on the outskirts of the village, in a two-roomed house with a rickety wooden ‘staircase’, a rat-infested thatched roof and uneven mud floors. She uses the downstairs room as the camp dispensary and upstairs is her bed-sitting-room, where she cooks what little food is available on a tiny oil-stove.
    Kay and I had been talking for less than fifteen minutes when Chimba came rushing back to inform us that the American Ambassador and his wife would like to tour the camp – so we all hurried off down the rough village ‘street’ to that other stretch of level common land where some 500 Tibetans of all ages have been camping since their trek last winter from the northermost part of the Dholpo region of Nepal. Most of these Tibetans belong to the independent nomad tribes who tend flocks of sheep and yak in the Nepalese– Tibetan frontier areas, and they have never been accustomed to discipline or control from any quarter; they do acknowledge some tenuous link with His Holiness as their religious leader, yet they were never within the political sphere of influence of the Lhasa Government or the spiritual sphere of influence of the Potala. In Kathmandu one hears many different versions of the same stories about the intractability of Tibetans in Nepal – depending on the teller’s racial, religious, political, social or personal biases – and it is almost impossible to sift out the truth. But I suspect it is fair to say that ingeneral the Tibetan refugee in Nepal differs considerably from his compatriot in India and is much more difficult to cope with.
    At present these Tibetans are being issued with a weekly ration of US Surplus Food – Bulgar wheat, cotton-seed oil and dried skimmed milk – and they are living in 120 ragged cotton tents; but we hope to provide better shelter for them before the monsoon breaks in mid-June.
    During our tour of the camp I made an impulsive purchase. As we walked between the tents my attention was distracted from what His Excellency had to say by an object lying on the palm of a Tibetan’s hand. The object in question was very small, very black and very vocal; its piercing squeaks fatally attracted me to Ngawang Pema’s side and a moment later I had done a deal and one twelve-day-old Tibetan mongrel bitch was promised to me for all of ten-and-sixpence. I wonder what the astrologists would make of the fact that this pup and I entered Nepal on the same date – the first of May.
    Penjung, the camp leader, had just invited us all to drink tea in his tent when a rainstorm broke and the Ambassador’s Peace Corps escort decided that he and Mrs Stebbins had better be transported at once to the comparatively luxurious Peace Corps house some four miles away in Pokhara Bazaar. So Penjung hurriedly produced a pair of white scarves and draped them around the Stebbinses’ necks before the rattling Tourist Department jeep arrived to rescue the visitors.
    Kay and I then had tea with Penjung and his wife and four daughters. The rain was cascading down both outside and inside their flimsy tent, where we sat cross-legged on filthy bamboo matting while chickens pecked around us, and Penjung’s wife coughed incessantly, and a baby with dysentery whimpered in one corner; yet Tibetans are never as gloomy as their conditions might warrant and my happiness at being back among these people was undiminished by the surrounding squalor.
    When the downpour temporarily ceased we slopped our way back to the village through slippery, ankle-deep mud – and there we found a broken-down jeep, with which two mortified Peace Corps boys were frantically fiddling while the Stebbinses sat on wooden benches in abazaar-stall, looking blissfully happy. (At the time this happiness seemed to be a brilliant exercise in diplomacy, but later I discovered that both are quite capable of enjoying such misadventures.) Kay immediately invited them to her room,