Study Circles Update

Project Update: The Missing Peace

Project Update: Women of Tibet Film Trilogy

Upcoming Events

We are very happy to welcome three new members to the Dalai Lama Foundation Board of Directors. Marsha Clark has been a volunteer staff member since the Foundation's inception. Darlene Markovich is Project Director for The Missing Peace; The Dalai Lama Portrait Project and President of the Committee of 100 for Tibet. Randy Taran has been an active volunteer for the past two years and is responsible for the YouthMoves section of the Dalai Lama Foundation website.

For the past 2 years, our good friend Rik Roberts has provided expert guidance to the foundation in all things financial. Rik has moved on to focus on his other activities, including coaching baseball at a local high school. We are all grateful to Rik for his invaluable contributions. Taking over from Rik is Deborah Ryan. Deborah (accent on the second syllable) is an accountant specializing in non-profits and small businesses - as well as a former Peace Corp volunteer in Poland - and has been helping with our bookkeeping from the beginning.

Thupten Samdup of the Canada Tibet Committee is establishing a National Committee for The Dalai Lama Foundation in Canada. For further information please contact Thupten at samdup@tibet.ca.

Two Articles by DLF staff members have been featured in recent issues of the Snow Lion Newsletter from Snow Lion Publications. Tenzin Tethong's essay His Holiness the Dalai Lama: A Life's Calling was originally prepared in 2004 for the program of the Kalachakra for World Peace in Toronto. Marsha Clark describes her visit to Sera Mey Monastery in Preserving a Sacred Tradition.

On Mother's Day, the Chinese Women's Association (thank you Judy Chang!) put on a wonderful brunch at Ming's Restaurant in Palo Alto, CA, as a fundraiser for our friend Rosemary Rawcliffe's Women of Tibet film Trilogy. We were blessed with the presence of honored mothers from both the Tibetan and Chinese communities. It was a wonderful mingling of the Tibetan, Chinese and Vietnamese cultures. (There was even talk on this auspicious occasion of creating a new organization dedicated to building ties of friendship between these three great cultures whose life has been nurtured for centuries by the great Mekong river they share.)

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Our network of Study Circles using the Dalai Lama's book Ethics for the New Millennium continues to thrive. There are now (at last count!) 9 Study Circles in 6 countries.

Here's a recent email from Emmanuel Ivorgba, a Professor of Engineering in Jos, Nigeria.

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Here's the latest from Project Director Darlene Markovich...

The vision we set forth for The Missing Peace Project in late 2003 has become a reality due to the great generosity and efforts of the participating artists and the advisory board and Project teams. Most facets of the Project are now underway - here are some highlights:

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Here is an update from filmmaker Rosemary Rawcliffe...

Thanks to several extraordinary benefactors, during the past eighteen months work on the Women of Tibet trilogy has progressed in leaps and bounds. Principle photography on all three films is now complete with the exception of one final interview with His Holiness the Dalai Lama scheduled for later this year.

This past fall, my film crew and I traveled to New York, where we interviewed the renowned Jungian analyst Marion Woodman. A few weeks later we interviewed Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker at her home in Berkeley, CA, and in November we traveled to Austria to interview Heinrich Harrer, author of Seven Years in Tibet. All these interviews were for Gyalyum Chemo, the Great Mother, our film about the Dalai Lama's late mother. We have been given legal license to use images from Heinrich Harrer and Peter Aufschnaiter's extensive photographic collections in the trilogy. These rare and never before seen images will play an integral role in reconstructing a historical context and sense of the Tibetan lifestyle before occupation by the Communist Chinese.

February of this year found us in Dharamsala, capturing the last of our interviews, including an interview with the Nechung Kuten, oracle to the Dalai Lama and the government in exile. Kuten la talked about Gyalyum Chemo's deep love and connection to the Tibetan people, and described time he spent with her at Kashmir Cottage and her kindness to him as a young monk. We returned to the US via Taipei where we interviewed Khedroob Thondup, Gyalyum Chemo's grandson and editor of her book, Dalai Lama, My son. Khedroob gave me access to the family photo archive providing rare images of intimate family moments for the Great Mother film.

Last but not least, three weeks ago we launched a brand new website (www.womenoftibet.org) dedicated to the Women of Tibet film project.

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