Training in Nepal

After completing their training in Cambodia in January 2007, the Norlha team moved on to Nepal. In Cambodia they had learned silk weaving, in Nepal they would learn how to spin, dye and weave wool.

Dechen, Yidam, Dunko, Drukmo Kyi and Sonam Dolma spent two months in Nepal, training in Christopher Giercke’s workshop in Katmandu. They worked with camel hair and some of the yak wool Dechen had collected over a year before. They also bought second hand looms and other weaving equipment that were loaded in a truck and driven over the border to Dam, then onto Lhasa, followed by three days up the Lhasa Golmund Highway. Sonam Dolma rode with the truck, arriving in Ritoma in mid-April. She said the truck driver, seeing her on edge, had urged her to sleep. “How could I? With all the overturned trucks that I saw lying along the highway. I was shaking the whole time,” she recounted.