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sign a seventeen point agreement to which the Tibetans bowed as no other country
came to rescue.
For eight years the Chinese cleverly had soldiers advance into
the country with hope of making Tibet a part of China. During the same period
the Tibetan people struggled to live with peace and harmony and then in March
1959 a major uprising took place and the Tibetan people, monks, nuns and
children took to the street revolting against the Chinese. The Chinese soldiers
then plundered on the defenceless Tibetan people and brutally murdered and
robbed the people. Thousands of Tibetans were killed and so were hundreds of
monasteries and temples looted.
The
Chinese invasion into Tibet in 1959 led to His Holiness the Dalai Lama (temporal
and spiritual leader) to flee his homeland and take refuge in India. Hundreds
and thousands of Tibetan families with their children also followed the leader.
The path of escape into India was not easy for the Tibetan families with their
belongings and children, trekking over the Snow Mountain for weeks and months
facing snow blizzard, starvation and the fear of the Chinese soldiers. The
refugees arrived in India exhausted and sick. At the Indian border the Indian
Government welcomed the Tibetan leader and the people.
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This was a huge blessing
for the Tibetan people who then spread around the border areas and worked at all
kinds of jobs for their living. In the early years most of the Tibetan families
worked with the PWD (Public Works Department) as manual labors assisting in the
construction of roads. Then the Prime Minister of India, Late Pandit Jawahar Lal
Nehru provided His Holiness a permanent residential place to stay in Mussoorie.
The house where His Holiness lived in 1960's still stands at Happy valley and is
known as the Birla House. A huge number of Tibetan families followed the leader
to Mussoorie and the condition of the Tibetan refugees at that particular
time was sad. The harsh journey from Tibet led to the death of many
Tibetan families, which in turn left a huge number of orphaned children.
The first concern of His Holiness at Mussoorie were the hundreds of
orphan, semi orphan and destitute Tibetan children and their future. His
Holiness then stressed the need to set up homes for these children where
on they are provided witha a normal upbringing based on the Pestalozzi
village at Trogen in Switzerland and thus Tibetan Homes Foundation was
born in November 1962 with three homes and seventy-five children. The
three homes were purchased by donations made by His Holiness.
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