Bill Muhlenfeld, owner of a mortgage company, got the message about the Tibetan cause while walking past the building housing the Chinese consulate at Michigan and Monroe, where a group of picketers offered him a leaflet.
Steve and Nina Schroeder–a banker and a museum curator–became converts during a 1987 sight-seeing trip to Tibet. They were unprepared for the misery they witnessed. An old monk pulled them aside one day, took a notebook from the folds of his robe, and showed them a picture of the forbidden Tibetan flag he had carefully drawn. “Please help us,” he said.
Ann Connors, the 33-year-old sponsorship coordinator, urges the novice sponsors–including Muhlenfeld, Quinn, Donnelly, and Lane–to decorate the apartments and stock the refrigerators before the immigrants arrive, to put their “own personal touch on the place.” This, she says, is an opportunity to “develop a long-lasting relationship with someone who is very special.” Connors, who works for Price Waterhouse, knows the Dalai Lama’s brother, who was a colleague of her father’s at Indiana University. Connors has become a Buddhist, and two of her sisters have married Tibetans.
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Besides the sponsors, the project has volunteer committees that deal with employment, health, housing, education, and publicity. All of which represents a lot of work for a relatively minuscule group of immigrants. Thus far 14 Tibetans have arrived in Chicago, and 86 more will come in the next nine months. But the elaborate support system is necessary, Libman explains, because Tibetans, unlike almost every other group of immigrants, have no community of their own here to rely on. Until the first arrivals came, there were only two Tibetans in the entire Chicago metropolitan area–for that matter, only 500 live in the entire United States.
Chris Panos, the project’s employment coordinator, has firm commitments already for about 80 jobs. Some of them came through friends and friends of friends; many are with companies Panos called blind. Most are low-paying, entry-level positions; many are in hotels, restaurants, laundries, and retail stores. Panos, a low-key 32-year-old, admits he’s surprised at how many favorable responses he’s had from prospective employers. “Once they understand that these are special people coming from a horrific situation they’re usually really anxious to help.”
China has since relocated part of its teeming population to the wide-open spaces of Tibet, offering large bonuses to anyone willing to move, and today the number of Chinese living in Tibet (7.5 million) exceeds the number of Tibetans (about 6 million). In addition, some 500,000 Chinese soldiers are billeted there to discourage any moves toward independence. Nina Schroeder says the soldiers consider Tibet a hardship post, and the Chinese immigrants seem none too pleased with the thin air, the cold weather, or the land, most of which can’t be used to grow rice.
American silence about the situation in Tibet was broken only occasionally, as when the Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 for his insistent call for world brotherhood. Instead of urging Western nations to use their militaries to liberate Tibet, he appealed to the world’s imagination. The entire Tibetan plateau, he suggested, should be designated a “zone of ahimsa,” a kind of sanctuary dedicated to peace and nonviolence where human beings and nature could learn to live in harmony. Yet when he visited President Bush in the spring of 1991, he was not invited to address Congress, and Bush did not ask the media to photograph the two leaders conferring; the visit seemed to be a nonevent as far as the major radio and television networks were concerned.
