Paving the Way for New Opportunities
Winter is the slack season in Yamda. Purbu has plenty of time to spend at home, making butter tea and playing with her chubby grandson. In March the village holds a traditional ceremony to mark the start of spring plowing, after which Purbu sows her hectare of land with barley, potato and other crops. A bumper harvest is still hoped for, but unlike in her parents’ time, if the harvest is poor the family won’t be ruined, as their income is supplemented by her husband’s successful transportation business.
Purbu’s family and other local families have benefited hugely from the jump start the housing project has given the transportation industry due to the huge amounts of building materials it has needed. Transportation has overtaken farming as the main source of income in Yamda.
More and better roads have also contributed to the expansion of this industry as well as significantly improving the mobility of local residents, allowing them to seek jobs in Lhasa. Few can believe that 60 years ago there were only two motor vehicles and one paved road in whole Tibet. Even 20 years later only one hard surfaced road had been built in regional capital Lhasa.
In those years a bicycle was such a luxury that each local factory or government division had only one, and their employees would queue up for their turn to ride it. By 1976 public transport in Lhasa consisted of just two or three buses cruising through the city from its eastern to western suburb, and only three times a day – once in the morning, once at noon, and once in the afternoon. The situation improved little in the next decade. Purbu remembered how in the early 1990s she had to walk a long way from her home just to get to the nearest bus station, where only two buses stopped every day.
Today broad asphalt roads radiate in all directions from the center of the city. One, lined with solar-powered lights, crosses the fields of waving crops by the village and passes by Purbu’s front door. It is part of a RMB 6 million infrastructure project funded by the local government.
Buses commuting between the village and Lhasa stop here every half hour, making Purbu’s regular pilgrimages to the Potala Palace much easier. She goes to the religious shrine three times a month to pray. Motorcycles are the dominant means of transport in the village, but most families own other vehicles such as tractors and trucks.
“Current policies give people more options, and everyone is duly rewarded for the efforts they make. People with greater abilities get better returns,” said village chief Jigmei. Half of the population of Yamda is now involved in transportation, and another 20 percent have jobs in Lhasa, with the remaining 30 percent being either the elderly, who are all covered by a new pension scheme for rural residents, or children.
Better income and social security have led to profound changes in everyday life, including to daily meals. Though Purbu’s family maintains a large crop of barley, it is not only used for food. They barter the grain for meat and butter, or sell it to a local brewery, which has signed a collective supply contract with the village and buys at a price 10 percent above the market price. Barley cake is no longer the main foodstuff and locals enjoy a diverse and nutritious diet with more and more vegetables, now grown locally, while eating in a restaurant is no longer a luxury.
Back in her new home, Purbu tells us about the guestrooms that she keeps, which she says will be filled with the noise and laughter of visiting friends and relatives during the Tibetan New Year. “With a more comfortable life and a bigger house, we expect more guests,” she says, beaming with delight.
By Zhang Hong
Source: Chinatoday
Editor: Dong Lin
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