Since 1996 THI management has made their priority the development and growth of the value-added products made in the Kathmandu workshop. Before meeting PRT members in 1995 and 1996, THI had only a few customers from Europe. With the support of PRT members, the company has had the opportunity to introduce their products to the United States. Now THI is able to sell a good quantity of their products in the United Status, primarily through dZi: the Tibet Collection, a mail-order company based in Washington, D.C. Each season dZi works with THI to develop new paper products, such as journals, stationery sets, incense sets in boxes, small portable meditation boxes, picture frames, and photo albums. Samples are made up and shown by dZi at the various trade fairs. Wholesale orders are taken and the items are then produced at THI. Mac McCoy, president of dZi, is a founding member of the Fair Trade Federation (FTF). Tibetan Handicraft Industry, through Paper Road/Tibet, is also a member of this group. The FTF is an international association of both for-profit and non-profit organizations who are committed to providing fair wages and employment opportunities to low-income artisans and farmers worldwide. Their mission is to support businesses that practice fair trade for economic benefits of low-income producers worldwide. By providing networking opportunities, information exchange, media exposure, and member promotion, FTF builds market preference for fair trade goods and furthers the worldwide fair trade movement.           With PRT support, the three co-owners of THI—Samten Lama, Nima Sherpa, and Nimto Sherpa—have all been able to visit the United States. While here they participated in several workshop programs in several cities, organized by PRT to demonstrate how to make Himalayan handmade lhokta paper. This included Nima’s trip in the fall of 1998 and Samten and Nimto’s trip in 2000. In both years they held workshops in Washington, D.C., Colorado Springs, and Berkeley; in 1998 in Bloomington, Indiana; and in 2000 in New York City. In 2000 Nimto and Samten participated in the ten-day Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which featured Tibet: Beyond the Land of Snow. Nimto and Samten joined ninety fellow Tibetans from India and a nomad family from Ladakh to create a Tibetan craftspersons’ village on the Mall in Washington. (It was a unique experience for the participating Tibetans as well as the visitors, since the Tibetans are now spread throughout the world.) The festival was visited by 1.2 million people, most of whom passed through the papermaking tent! Nima and Samten have also traveled to Australia, Nima has traveled to England, and Nimto to Germany, Switzerland, and England. These international contacts have further broadened THI’s customer base. Tibetan Handicraft Industry, by any standards, is an exemplary company. The management has put aside their personal rewards to put earnings back into the company. Tibetan Buddhists themselves, the manager are respectful of the special days and holidays for both Buddhist and Hindu members of their staff. They have made a particular point of hiring and training fellow villagers who have migrated to Kathmandu in search of better work opportunities. They have been mindful of those with handicaps or medical needs, helping them to obtain medical care in Kathmandu, providing housing and appropriate piecework. With the international contacts THI has made, they have continued to pass back helpful connections and referrals to their fellow villagers. The THI managers are also conscientious about the environmental issues in their business. They observe the established Nepali system for harvesting lhokta in a way that gives forest areas periods of rest for regrowth.  THI produces journals, gift boxes, gift note cards, paper lanterns, shopping bags, Tibetan incense, incense-scented candles, and pashmina wool scarves as well as sheet papers that are vegetable-dyed, chemical-dyed, tie-dyed, silk-screen printed, and wood block printed. Currently THI’s biggest customer is Kahari Paper in Germany, which buys the natural, natural-dyed, and chemical-dyed sheet papers and a few stationery and pashmina products. The second largest customer is dZi: the Tibet Collection, for value-added product items. In the spring of 2001, PRT worked with THI to develop a series of photo albums, photo boxes, and clamshell boxes with matching mats for a few Washington, D.C. photographers. It is hoped that this line of products will expand and provide THI with somewhat standardized products that the staff can produce when they do not have more urgent and unique orders to fill. For the future, the company plan is to preserve the traditional papermaking arts and to provide job opportunities for more people who will come to Kathmandu from the mountain villages in order to learn additional production skills. THI staff members have become the primary teachers of Tibetan papermaking, recycled papermaking, and the production of value-added products at the hand papermaking program based at PRT’s other partner organization, the Jatson Chumig Welfare Special School, in Lhasa, Tibet. Nimto first came to Lhasa with me in 1998, the school's first year at its new building. Nimto is an excellent teacher. His respect for the students and his gentle yet firm manner quickly taught the young papermakers more professional and efficient methods of making paper. During the summer of 1999 Nimto returned to Lhasa, working with Tom Leech both in Lhasa and in the villages of Pasom and Chunzom, near Everest, to restart a tradition of Tibetan hand papermaking. In January of 2001, Nimto and fellow staff member Farindra went into Lhasa to deliver the calender press PRT had located for the workshop and to teach the papermakers book binding and box making. They designed several new products for the Jatson Chumig workshop to produce. In May and June, 2001, Ngawang Choegyang, the staff supervisor of papermaking at the Jatson Chumig School, traveled to spend time at THI in Kathmandu, where he learned about production techniques. Jampa Tsundhup, the Founding Director of the Jatson Chumig School, and Tenzin Choedon, his daughter and the Assistant Director of the School, have also visited THI in Kathmandu. We hope that PRT can help bring young papermakers from the school workshop to THI, to experience what it is like to be part of a large production staff and to get a greater sense of the market in the tourist shops in Kathmandu. PRT feels THI has made significant strides as an international fair trade company in the last six years. When the Paper Road/Tibet’s parent non-profit, the Crossing Over Consortium, Inc., was closed in June of 2001, the PRT project members from the United States felt completely comfortable handing over the direct supervision of the papermaking program in Lhasa to Nimto Sherpa and his partners in Kathmandu. The timing feels right for the project to be managed by Tibetans for Tibetans. PRT has established the PRT Education and Exchange Fund with THI. This will support both sending THI staff members to teach in Lhasa and the Qomolungma Nature Preserve in southern Tibet, and bringing the Jatson Chumig papermakers to Kodari and Kathmandu, for apprenticeships at THI. In addition to their exemplary management of their rapidly expanding business, Samten, Nima, and Nimto each have a personal social project. Samten Lama is the General Secretary of the Nepal Buddhist Welfare Association. As members of a minority religion in predominantly Hindu Nepal, Buddhists are represented by the Buddhist Welfare Association in a number of areas. The current political climate leans towards prohibiting the observation of Buddhist sacred days as work holidays and there is virtually no Tibetan culture taught in the schools. The association concerns itself with these and other issues. In 1996 Samten was one of the primary organizers of a massive bus trip from the Kathmandu area to near the border of eastern Nepal to Silugadi, India. Over 200,000 Nepali Buddhists attended a teaching of the Kalachakra there by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.  Nima Sherpa's wife and four children, aged three to ten, live in his mountain village, Bigu. Previously there was no school in the village. Children would have had to travel great distances to attend school, meaning that many simply did not go at all. Nima and several villagers started the Himalayan Region Welfare English School, Bigu. It has expanded from a one-classroom school to currently employing five teachers, enabling students to attend up to grade five for the first time. Several of the highest level students took the district level exam and passed with good scores. At this point the school cannot afford to add grade six, though, presenting a problem for those who want to continue their studies. Many of the parents cannot afford to send their children to the schools in Kathmandu, for which they have to pay. Nima is also the Secretary of the Himalayan Social Service Youth Club. Nimto Sherpa has been concerned about some very basic issues of hygiene, nutrition, and ecology in his village, Chilangkha. He is the Chairman of the Sagarmantha Social Service Committee (SSSC), which has carried out a number of very effective measures. Last year the SSSC purchased toothbrushes and personal wash cloths for each child in the village school. This started a personal hygiene wave among the children’s families. The SSSC has been working on developing a nursery to teach the villagers both to grow and eat more vegetables, and to plant tree seedlings to replace those harvested for fuel and for household prayer flagpoles. The SSSC collected funds to restore the Buddhist statues in the Changchup Mantok monastery, which had been vandalized by strangers. This year the SSSC has been able to provide solar units to seventeen families. They hope to provide these units to more families in the future, fully electrifying the village. The SSSC has made year 2002 calendars (production supported by THI) with photographs of the village area. Sales from these calendars will fund the continuation of the solar project. Finally the SSSC has an education project in Kathmandu, the Chilangkha English Language Institute, which is a non-profit/non-governmental organization providing English language education to villagers from the Chilangkha district and other villages in Nepal who have moved to Kathmandu. The school has some support from individuals in the United Kingdom for the teachers’ salaries. Some students pay Nrs 250 per month, while many students attend without charge. The SSSC is seeking volunteers to donate mornings and evenings teaching English at the Institute. With the closing in June 2001 of the non-profit Crossing Over Consortium, the non-profit aspects of the Paper Road/Tibet project have been transferred to Pyramid Atlantic, in Maryland. Those readers who wish to support any of the specific projects mentioned in this article can designate which project and make their donations payable to "Paper Road/Tibet at Pyramid Atlantic." Contributions can be sent to this magazine or to Pyramid Atlantic, 6001 66th Avenue Suite 103, Riverdale, MD 20737.Tie-dyed Lhokta Paper Made by Tibetan Handicraft Industry The method of tie-dying paper was developed as shibori-zome in Japan, where the paper used is usually kozo treated with konnyaku to further strengthen it. In Nepal the tough lhokta paper is used, usually a mid-weight, twenty gram sheet. Nepal has adapted the look of tie-dying to a different aesthetic. In 1998 I had the pleasure of watching Nimto Sherpa, a partner of Tibetan Handicraft Industry (THI), teach the Tibetan papermaking students at the Jatson Chumig School in Lhasa to make tie-dyed papers. Without showing them a finished sheet or telling them what the result would be, Nimto had the students fold large papers in an elaborate sequence. Water-resistant, nylon string was then coiled tightly around the end of triangular shapes in the folded sheets, leaving the tiny tips clear. Further up the triangles, a second area was bound with the string. If there was enough room on the folded sheet, he had them bind a third section, leaving the widest part of the triangles free.  The smaller halves of the bound triangles were then held in a mid-toned dye for a few minutes. The larger halves of the bound triangles were held in a lighter dye for a few minutes, with some overlap onto the portion dipped into the first dye. Finally the tip ends were dipped into a dark blue-black dye. (He used fountain pen ink: it was all he had available and it worked well to contrast the lighter natural colored dyes.) When the moisture had drained out, the strings were removed, revealing a tie-dyed sheet with focal points of the darker dyes. The young papermakers were transfixed by what they had created! The papers were spread on a metal sheet to dry in the sun.  For the large (30" x 20") lhokta tie-dyed sheets used for this paper sample, the workers at THI create a variety of overall patterns by varying both the number and size of the focal points. The artisan first decides how many and what size tie-dyed “flowers” will be on the sheet: a grid of twenty, a row of six large flowers, etc. Then the sheet is divided and each area is treated as above. These samples were made using commercial chemical dyes. THI learned to make tie dyed paper in 1997 at the Cottage Industry Training Center, a government-run program in Kathmandu. THI sells some of its tie-dyed papers in Europe, for use as wrapping paper. Most is sold to other companies and is used for the production of lampshades in Kathmandu. Jane Farmer