“For many years, the Tibetan community in the Surmang area has been helped and supported by members of Shambhala and others living in Europe. These activities have now been grouped into the Gesar Fund, registered in the Netherlands. The Fund aspires to grow into a strong organization that can extend its activities beyond Surmang to include support for people in the regions of Kham and Golok. I very much welcome this development and I would like to encourage people of good heart to contribute generously to these projects that will be so meaningful to the Tibetans living there.” (Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, June, 2009)

The “Gesar Fund” is a new name for the European foundation within the Shambhala Mandala that supports medical and educational projects in Tibetan areas. It was formerly called the Surmang Europe Foundation and used to work closely with the American/Chinese Surmang Foundation. However, because the Surmang Foundation does not comply anymore with the legal requirements we have in The Netherlands for nonprofit charities, we had to choose between giving up our non profit status or sever our bonds with the Surmang Foundation. Having chosen to do the latter we also decided to broaden our activities beyond just Surmang to Kham and Golok and also to extend them beyond just healthcare to include education. We also offered our services to Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche in choosing our projects in the area of healthcare and education in Kham and Golok, as well as in Surmang. This offer is closely related to the connection of Sakyong Mipham and Khandro Tseyang with - and responsibility for - people in Kham and Golok. In order to express that connection to our Shambhala sangha we choose a new name for our foundation: Gesar Fund. This name reflects the Shambhala view that includes taking care of physical and social well-being as part of creating enlightened society.

We are pleased to announce two new projects that we are fundraising for:

- Education in Surmang
We are funding a small educational project in Surmang through the Könchok Foundation with the help of Khenpo Tsering. We offer about a hundred young children some form of education that they otherwise would not be able to receive. We are planning and looking forward to developing this project further.

- Health care in Kham
We also initiated an extensive health care project in Kham. Certain areas close to Yushu (Jekundo) are notorious for a high percentage of tuberculosis. It is mainly the monks in remote monasteries and the nomads who suffer from this, often without knowing. They infect others who occasionally go to the cities and spread the disease there. The people in the cities have the possibility of going to a clinic but for the nomads and monks there is no healthcare close by.

Our project, carried out in cooperation with doctors of the Health Department of Chenduo County, consists of buying a car with an X-ray machine and offer its use to the Health department’s hospital that is specialized in infectious diseases. Doctors will go with this car to all the remote townships in Chenduo County (to begin with) and test and treat the people for free. We have just joyfully and ceremoniously signed a contract (designed by our sangha member and international lawyer Jason Newman and translated into Chinese by Mr. Nyima Kunga, the son-in-law of Acharya Han de Wit) with this Department.

We are very excited about this project and so are the four Tibetan hospital doctors that committed themselves to this project! We very much hope our Shambhala sangha will also be inspired to support these two projects in these economically difficult times. For further information about budgets of these two projects you can email our current treasurer, Mr. Eric Elbers (e.elbers@gesarfund.nl).
By Willem Kuijpers, Chairman and Acharya Han de Wit, member of the Executive Committee and author.