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Summer 2013: Message from the Editor

Summer greetings from Trace Foundation! Much has happened since we sent our last newsletter in December, and I’m delighted to share a few of the most exciting developments.

Our children’s program finished its sixth year with great attendance. The students, ages three to seven, churned their own butter, learned how to bring the Year of the Water Snake in the proper way, and played with abchug, or sheep's knuckles dried and colored for use in games. Now, I’m pleased to share with you a story about their Losar celebration. If you have a little one in your life, I hope you’ll bring him or her out for the program when it starts up again in the fall.

In June, we invited international special guests Puntsok Tsering, Kunsel Dawa, Tsultrim Gyatso, and Jim Canary to help us celebrate the writing arts of Tibet, with calligraphy demos and hands-on traditional paper-making. Visitors learned about classical and modern calligraphy, Bönpo scripts, and sand painting, and at the end, got to try their hands at making paper, the traditional Tibetan way. After you read the article “A Tour Through Tibet's Writing Arts,” be sure to check out our gallery of the artwork from our auction. There are still some gorgeous pieces available for purchase.

If you missed this event, we invite you to come out for our next one. Explore the richness of Tibetan ghost stories and celebrate Halloween by sending us your scariest, most hair-raising entries for a Tibetan ghost story competition. Our panel will select and translate into English five of your nominated stories. Then, on October 24, join us in our library or online (via Livestream) to vote on the three most terrifying, grisly, and spine-chilling stories. The three winning stories will receive sweet prizes and the top five will be published on our website in Tibetan and English. Check out our submission guidelines in English and Tibetan.

Over the past few years, our library has worked indefatigably with consultants to record local stories, folk literature and traditions, and anecdotes of an older generation of Tibetans. Bringing together individuals from all walks of life, from village elders to musicians and shoe cobblers, these oral histories offer a unique pre- and post-1959 history of Tibet. Now, we are thrilled to announce that we’ve launched the first six histories online through our Oral History Archive, a small contribution to our work in celebrating this remarkable culture.

This summer, we were also proud to sponsor the thirteenth Annual International Association of Tibetan Studies (IATS) conference held in Ulaanbataar, Mongolia, as well as to support a number of young individuals to attend the conference—all of them for the first time. In addition to giving a presentation on our support to cultural heritage and conservation, we sponsored a unique performance by the National Song and Dance Academic Ensemble of Mongolia organized by the Mongolian Academy of Science in association with the National University of Mongolia.

We are also thrilled to announce that we have developed new postgraduate scholarships programs, one aimed at women in the sciences, awarded to students who have recently completed undergraduate studies to pursue masters or PhD studies in natural sciences, and another, the Professional Training Scholarship for Women in Law and Business Management, to support female professionals to pursue graduate degrees in law and business management. We encourage you to check out our scholarship page for more information.

Finally, I invite you to check out some of our latest publications hot off the presses. The first volume of a three-volume set of papers originally presented at the Third International Conference on Tibetan Language in 2011 is now available for purchase on www.blurb.com. The papers collected in this volume explore the roles of demographics, public policy, culture, technology, and more and seek to define domains for Tibetan-language use and issues.

The seventh issue (2011–2012) of the Latse Journal, which focuses on Tibetan cinema, is also now available on our website. Under the guidance of guest editor Françoise Robin, the issue traces the arc of filmmaking in Tibet from the 1950s on, with articles and essays by scholars and filmmakers.

And last but not least, our 2011–2012 activity report is now available on our website and is filled with fascinating stories from the Plateau. Whether you’re reading about the lively tradition of Tibetan love letters, the future of Tibetan medicine, or development of Tibetan computer fonts, I invite you to lose yourself in the rich stories, lives, and traditions this part of the world continues to offer and see firsthand why—after twenty years—our work continues to enrich communities and better lives from New York to Lhasa.

If what you see here inspires you, please check out our GlobalGiving campaign to cover the tuition and living costs for thirty PhD and master's-degree Tibetan students in a diverse range of professions. We still have a way to go before we reach our goal of $78,000. But when we come together, even small contributions, have the potential to make a profound impact: to help us give access to education and transform a generation.

As always, thank you for your support, and enjoy your summer.

Paola Vanzo

Director of Communications and Development