Refugees: From Yaks to Yodels

In the tiny Swiss mountain village of Unterwasser, near the Austrian border, live people with names like Tsering Ken-chock, Tashi Samdup and D’Olma Doji. Instead of being apple-cheeked blonds, they are brown-faced, black-haired, almond-eyed, and smell faintly of rancid yak butter.

All 23 of the new villagers are Tibetan refugees who were flown in to Zurich two months ago by chartered plane. Their Unterwasser home has an elevation of 3,000 ft., only about one-fourth that of Tibet, but Switzerland lies 15° north of their Asian homeland and the climatic conditions are much the same. Explains Lama Wangyal about the extraordinary transplant: “The mountains make us happy. We do not have forests, and our houses are built of stone, not wood. But this is also a country of snow, cheese and milk.”

Like their God-King, the Dalai Lama, the Tibetans left their homes to escape brutal Red Chinese repression after the failure of the 1959 revolt. They were brought to Switzerland by ten Swiss calling themselves Friends of Tibet, and including members of a 1953 Himalayan mountain-climbing expedition, Asia scholars, authors and businessmen. The intense, quiet-mannered Tibetan moppets instantly charmed the Swiss with their small, deft hands and disarming smiles. The adults are faring equally well. In Unterwasser, a Red Cross social worker showed the four wide-eyed Tibetan women how to scrub the walls and launder their clothes with newfangled soap; a Swiss cook taught them patiently to prepare Swiss-German food. There are also educators and schoolbooks, lessons in how to use knife and fork and in how to ski, a sport unknown in Tibet. The men have jobs, ranging from digging ditches to carpentry to house painting.

The cautious Swiss are planning to bring in another 700 Tibetans, and some are even speaking of the value of a “blood refreshment” in the mountain valleys, which for years have been losing population to the towns and cities. There may soon be a Tibetan lamasery high in the Swiss Alps, and it is not inconceivable, in some future year, that a Swiss-Tibetan baby may prove to be a legitimate reincarnation of the Dalai Lama.