New Equipment Boosts Project to a New Level

by Carol Brighton

Tsamdol surveys her accomplishment!

This past summer I returned to Lhasa and the Jatson Chumig Welfare Special School (JCWSS) to team up with Tom and Nimto, and help bring the project to its new level. It is heartening to include Nimto as part of the team; his good humor and skills in papermaking and teaching proved to be exactly the help we needed. It was also an asset having three of us for such an intense period of work. We were able to alternate between the various tasks, and fill in when one or the other of us had to do supply runs to town.

We spent our days doing a variety of tasks that always involved the most fun htmlect of the work—working with the young papermaking students. Through the laughter, singing, and listening to their favorite music tapes (over and over again!) we taught papermaking, introduced products and production methods, and taught quality control in papermaking and in the final products. We shared the work and our experience in every way we could—sometimes in our bits of common language, often with Nimto’s capable Tibetan translation, and frequently by simple demonstration and by allowing the work to explain itself.

When I arrived—a week or so after Tom and Nimto—the Lee Scott McDonald Hollander beater had safely arrived, now un-crated, assembled and working after shipment from the U.S. The addition of the beater, the only one in Tibet, increases pulp production many times, and supplants the arduous work of hand beating with a wooden mallet. We can now incorporate sewing scraps that cannot be prepared by hand beating. Although it was a task that took planning and a day of our time, getting this several hundred pound piece of equipment hoisted to the studio on the second floor turned out to be easier than we had imagined, with the many helping hands that appeared at the right time. The move saved having to haul buckets of pulp up the stairs—backbreaking labor. We now have a rooftop wet studio for paper production and a dry studio for printing and making the final paper products.

The large electric platen press was also installed and ready for the summer work. Printing on a press adds to the list of skills our group has, and expands the variety of products the school can produce. So, with dies I brought from the U.S., photo engravings Jim Canary brought, and some locally carved woodblocks, product-making was underway. With the addition of the press, we can now cut envelopes by the hundreds, cut our desk top chortens and print images on cards. This summer’s work brought the project to a new level.

During the lulls in sheet production that can come while fiber is being cooked and beaten, I often sat with our young team and peeled bark off the fibers. We lightened the tedium by teaching each other words in our native languages—laughing as we sang out the growing list and tested each other’s memories. Later in the summer this tedious task of preparing fibers was turned over to the villages where the fibers are harvested, saving time at the school. Papermaking is supported by many other small jobs. One job is producing the papermaking moulds. I spent a couple of days working with Mingmar, helping him stretch thin cloth over wood frames and secure it with tacks to create the traditional Tibetan papermaking mould, a sturdy receptor for wet pulp. This essential job increased the inventory of moulds, and so increased our production capacity. Mingmar showed an interest in bookbinding, trying his hand at making a small book. We spent hours creating several handmade books from paper that he had produced. Creating a handmade paper product from start to finish and then seeing it sold in the school’s shop gives the students an understanding of the entire process and a tremendous sense of accomplishment. Another ongoing task is cooking fiber. The school’s papermakers are now expert at this, and after this summer’s work have come to understand the routine and rhythm of cooking fiber, beating it into pulp, preparing the pulp vat, and forming the sheets. The sheets are dried on the moulds in the Tibetan manner. On a sunny day it is possible to make two sets of paper, as the first set can dry in the morning and free up moulds for the afternoon’s work. So the days are a continuous movement of paper production.

When it rains, as it often can in the summer, paper production continues as the weather allows, and then there is indoor work to be done. The journals and chortens and various products all need cutting and assembly; this takes a period of training and supervision that we provided during our summer stay. The school gave the papermaking studio a treadle sewing machine from the sewing room next door, and we can now machine stitch paper products. This took a little practice (I hadn’t used a treadle machine in many years), but like riding a bicycle, you never forget. Tsamdol quickly took up the task of sewing the chortens, and became the expert at the treadle sewing machine, adding to her other expertise on the press and as a papermaker. During the summer we were offered a spot in a retail store, and we placed paper products in our first retail outlet in Lhasa, the shop at the Potala Rug factory.

To talk about what I did during my time in Lhasa is to talk about work that is part of my life all year round. Since its inception five years ago, PR/T has become a part of life’s constant routine of planning and thinking. We are part of a large dynamic of events working in Tibet, encompassing a dynamic of responses to the broad historical events and the individual relationships we’ve each made. Helping to reestablish hand papermaking is part of a larger rebuilding effort working to save a unique and precious culture, and it is a creative contribution that has changed our lives.