Across the Tibetan plateau, thousands lack adequate access to healthcare. Your help can make an enormous difference.

Moved by the plight of his countrymen, Khenpo Sherab Ozer has comitted to build medical clinics in remote areas of Tibet and to provide medical training for Buddhist nuns.

In addition to bringing dearly needed medical facilities to several rural communities, the Tibet Rural Medicine Project will serve to strengthen and promote traditional Tibetan medicine, an increasingly endangered system of medicine which successfully treats some diseases deemed incurable or which require costly and invasive procedures in Western medicine.

The project will further provide Buddhist nuns, with traditionally only limited access to education, the opportunity to study medicine and serve their community's medical needs.

Nakchu
Located roughly 200 miles to the north of Lhasa, the Rusar District of Nakchu (in Kham) is home to 30,000 inhabitants. It is a high, cold and windy place, where the people there are principally nomadic and have little contact with people from the outside world. They lack the conveniences of modern technology and infrastructure. Likewise, arable land and fresh produce are in short supply. Schools and hospitals are extremely rare.

Establishing a medical clinic in such a region will go a long way towards alleviating the many difficulties and sufferings of the local people. For this reason, Khenpo Sherab Ozer intends to build a medical clinic in the Rusar district of Nakchu. The new facility will:

• House 5 sickrooms, so that nomadic patients will be able to stay for further treatment.
• Include one examination room with a pharmacy and one bathroom.
• Provide the salary for one physician and two nurses.
• Provide medicines to patients free of charge.
• Be overseen by Dr. Trabkar, a Tibetan doctor with more than 25 years of experience treating patients in Nakchu. Thoroughly trained in traditional Tibetan medicine and pharmacology, he currently sees over 1,000 patients annually in the Rusar District. He does not charge a consultation fee and, because Khenpo Sherab Ozer has sponsored the annual cost of medicines since 2002, patients receive medicine free of charge as well.

Nangchen
The Nangchen region of Eastern Tibet (Kham) is home to six nunneries belonging to the Drikung Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, and with a combined population of over 700 nuns. These nunneries are scattered across large remote areas and span Qinghai and Sichuan Provinces. The largest of these is Tsili Nunnery with 450 nuns. It is headed by Ani Khandro, a highly regarded nun who is currently 116 years old. Regrettably, the nuns from all the nunneries have little access to education or medical facilities.

Ani Khandro and Khenpo Sherab Ozer together founded a clinic at Tsili Nunnery in 2004. The clinic is headed by Dr. Karsam who worked at Yushu Hospital (the largest in the region) for 26 years.

Four nuns are currently working in the clinic as Dr. Karsam's apprentices. They write: "Our medical clinic has poor facilities. If one needs medical care for serious diseases, they have to go to Yushu Hospital, an ardous trip of 50 miles. The road is very poor and is rarely travelled. Due to this great hardship, we request your aid in providing medicine and health care to our remote community.”

In order to improve the quality of care at Tsili Nunnery and provide these four nuns with a comprehensive medical education, and to share this opportunity with other smaller nunneries in the region, the Tibet Rural Medicine Project intends to provide two nuns from each nunnery (and four from Tsili Nunnery) five years of training in Tibetan medicine. The project will:

• Build a facility at Tsili Nunnery to house the program. The finished building will include five dormitories able to house two nuns each, one room for the instructor, and one large classroom.
• Invite a skilled and qualified doctor to serve as instructor.
• Provide the instructor with a modest salary and travel expenses and the students with a monthly stipend.
• Run for six months per year for five years.
• Prepare the nuns to return to their nunneries to serve their community's medical needs.

Initial Project Costs
We estimate that the construction and support of these two initial programs over the course of five years will cost approximately US$100,000. Donations that are not earmarked for one of the two projects will be distributed between them by percentage at the same ratio as their five-year relative costs: 70% Nangchen, 30% Nakchu.

Project Costs: Nakchu & Nangchen

Project	Construction	Salaries & Stipends (5 Yr)	Medical & School Supplies (5 Yr)	Total Cost (5 Yr)
Nangchen	$9,000	$47,200	$13,900	$70,100
Nakchu	$7,400	$16,100	$6,700	$30,200
Combined	$16,400	$63,300	$20,600	$100,300

You can make an on-line donation via credit card or Paypal, or through check or money order.

Contributions in the form of checks or money orders may be sent to:

Drikung Namgyal Ling
Tibet Rural Medicine Project
PO Box 44176
Tucson, Arizona 85733

Please make checks out to DNL Tibet Rural Medicine Project. Your donation is fully tax deductible and will do tremendous good in bringing needed medical supplies and skills to rural Tibet.

For more information, please contact Pati Stein at 520-465-1882 or send email to pati@drikungkagyutucson.org