Kusho la's headache

Kusho la - our eternal volunteer - stuffed too many envelopes today that he got a headache. He gets these kind of headaches quite frequently - especially when he spends long hours looking at paper. He also says that his blood gets hot following these headaches. His eyes get terribly bloodshot, like the red robes that he wears - I've seen them myself! But he's all good and healthy the next day. After all, he's a robust, bullet-proof monk!

Hackers and Envelopes

A typical day at the SFT headquarters office in New York City...Lhadon's email account is often full of messages with virus-riden attachments, often sent by people who disagree with our work...Han's managing a big mailing of thank you notes and appeals to donors, with volunteers stuffing day and night!

Sonam Yeshi, Fashion @ Tibet House, March 11th!

March 11th will be marked by the debut collection of Sonam Yeshi at Tibet House in New York City. She will unveil her 2005 Spring Collection, a union of traditional Tibetan and young wearable urban designs. Yeshi grew up in India in a community of Tibetans in exile. She came to New York to pursue apparel design, but not without a vivid awareness of her culture and desire to create designs that could make that culture more accessible by means of a more urban and functional language.





http://sonamyeshi.com/invite.htm

Interview with Lhadon Tethong at March 10th Rally

Lhadon was in fine form, as always, acting as M.C. for most of the March 10th activities, both at Dag Hamerskold park near the U.N., and at the Chinese Consulate. With numb hands, and hoarse voice, she took a moment to be interviewed for the blog- click on the link below to listen!

Han's speech at Chinese Consulate

I am blogging live from across the street at the chinese consulate. my fingers are very very cold! below is a clip from a great speech given by Han. i also recorded a great interview with lhadon that should appear here soon!

Update: the full text of Han's speech has been posted on Phayul.com

SFT's "Kusho-la"

Sonam Wangdu-la, SFT's resident monk, is known to most simply as "kusho-la", a term of respect and endearment. After working his construction job each day (yes, monks, especially those in the U.S. work too!), he comes to the SFT office to volunteer and raise our spirits up with his jokes and laughter. I asked him to provide a quick introduction to himself, and here it is:

Saved Tenzin...now Free Him!

Remember back in December, when this was our chief concern: "Two years ago, Buddhist monk and teacher Tenzin Delek Rinpoche was arrested by Chinese authorities and sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit. Time is running out for Tenzin - he could be executed by the Chinese government at any moment."

The good news is, that he wasn't executed. We all made a difference collectively to save an innocent man's life. The bad news is that the Chinese have decided that Tenzin Delek will be spending the rest of his life in one of the worst, most notorious prison systems in the world. We can't and won't let that happen.

In the meantime, we should all look back, three months later, on a great week of ruckus-raising->Worldwide Action Video - (3 mins): Quicktime, MPEG-1 , Windows Media Player, Real Media Player VBR

For you blog/videoblog/vlog/indymedia geeks out there, this video was a successful experiment in collaborative, distributed independent media. We asked all of our students to send in photos, video, and audio from their actions around the world- India, California, Washington, New York, Poland, London, France, Spain....This media was collected, and then edited using Adobe Premiere on Windows XP, though it just as easily could have been done in iMovie. The video, in various formats, was then posted online using http://www.streamload.com to host it. Since then we've had at least 3000 downloads/viewings- very exciting result!