Self Sufficient

Yunnan Province, China 2007

The young man was herding a flock of sheep using only a sling shot of the type used by David when he slew Goliath. He’d pick up a suitable rock, lay it on the leather thong and whirl it around his head a time or two before firing with deadly accuracy. The wayward sheep was soon back in line.  Of course, we wanted to see more and we stopped.

The women were in the tent carding yak wool while a stew or soup boiled on the cooking fire. They had no furniture. Quilts substituted for chairs. They did have a shrine to Buddha in the center of the tent.

The black stuff you see on the ground is yak wool from a freshly killed yak. Buddhists are proscribed from killing anything, even an insect. But they are allowed to kill a yak after saying special prayers. Yak supply them with milk, butter, wool and meat. The main food is tsampa which is a barley that they mix with tea and some yak butter. I bought a cup of it at a fair in Yushou and it tasted like chicken soup to me.

The young man wears Buddhist amulets over his shirt. One was a silver vitrine with a likeness of Buddha inside. The Chinese used to forbid the Tibetans to have a picture of the Dalai Lama and I suppose they still do.