Starting an NGO in Tibet: A Conversation with Pam Logan
Pam Logan, author of Compassion Mandala, at Dzongsar Monastery in Garze Tibetan Autonomous Region, Sichuan, China
Pam Logan didn’t expect to become an international aid worker, let alone the founder of an NGO. While in college and graduate school for engineering, Logan spent her free time studying Shotokan karate and learned about the different ways other cultures used martial arts. She became especially interested in the way warriors from Kham, a region in western China inhabited by Tibetans, resisted Chinese rule.
Logan won a travel grant to visit Kham and soon left her budding career as an aeronautical engineer when she accepted a volunteer position for an organization in Hong Kong that sought to explore and preserve China’s far-reaching corners. Seven years after her first trip to Kham, Logan founded the Kham Aid Foundation, a non-profit to help people in this remote area that has long been plagued by poverty. But unlike some western aid workers, Logan didn’t try to reinvent the wheel; rather, along with her field director, Wu Bangfu, and other volunteers and interns, she worked with existing schools, health clinics, and cultural institutions to bring them desperately needed resources. Undomesticated spoke with Logan to discuss her new book, Compassion Mandala: The Odyssey of an American Charity in Contemporary Tibet. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Undomesticated: What struck me most about your book is that it’s very balanced. You don’t sugarcoat Tibet or China and instead show problems in both. That’s not usually the way Tibet is presented to English-speaking audiences. Just look at Richard Gere and Brad Pitt’s movies. What do you think is most misunderstood about Tibet and the areas of China that are inhabited by Tibetans, including the Kandze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, where you worked for 14 years? I think most people not familiar with the region believe that Tibet is only the Tibet Autonomous Region, an area with defined boundaries on a map.
Pam Logan: People in the United States tend to think of Tibet as a monolith. They think it's all pretty much like Lhasa. If you visit Lhasa you’d say, “Oh yeah I've been to Tibet.” Whereas in reality, Tibet is not a monolith. It's more of an onion. There are layers, and Lhasa and the historic sites of the Yarlung Tsangpo River Valley are the center of the onion, the historic center of the Tibetan Empire. But if you look at the outer layers, you get beyond the region of Ü-Tsang, into Amdo in the northeast, and Kham, where I worked, the people have historically looked to Lhasa for religious leadership but not for governance. Governance in those areas was a far more local affair. Very often, it was heavily influenced by whatever Chinese government or Chinese warlord was in power at the time.
Pam visiting with recipients of wheelchairs provided by Kham Aid.
Undomesticated: Those local officials were predominantly men. But you have always worked in male-dominated fields. Did your training as an aeronautical engineer help prepare you for your work with KhamAid?
Logan: If you're a foreigner in China, people tend to treat you as a very special person, whether you're male or female. So, although gender has a pretty big impact if you are Chinese or Tibetan, if you're a foreigner, it has less impact.
As a woman, a sea change happened when my hair started to turn gray. Before then, I would get hassled by men sometimes, and in China it is not as awful and insidious as it is in some other countries, but even small amounts of harassment can be pretty awful. When my hair started turning gray, that all went away. Younger women will get treated as a person who is not to be taken seriously, but for middle-aged women, I would say if your hair is going gray, let it. It could be an advantage, particularly in societies where elderly people are treated with reverence and respect. There, gray hair can work in your favor.
But about my aeronautical engineering background, yes, that did give me a very strong set of critical thinking and analytical tools to solve problems. For example, I saw development challenges as rooted in some very simple and concrete physical things like geography and transportation. I could seek solutions based on that, whereas people who don't have that background may tend to see things through a more political lens. And if you are trying to change the politics of how Tibet is governed by China, that's a pretty hopeless task. If people see things as being purely political, they tend to give up, but as an engineer, I can say, “I can do something about this.”
Undomesticated: I was so impressed with the ingenuity you used to find funding for KhamAid. One of your first endeavors was to bring books to rural schools, so you organized an adventure tour of Kham for a group from California. Can you talk a little about that and what was most challenging in getting that off the ground?
Logan: A lot of people wanted to go on a tour of Tibet that was beneficial to Tibetans rather than just bringing profit to Chinese companies and American companies. I understood that. However, I lacked direct experience in running tours and being a guide. Those are very specific skill sets that are much different from the skill sets I had as an explorer, writer, photographer, and development worker. I was poorly equipped, and I had to learn a lot in a hurry, and my clients had to bear with me. In the case of the more adventurous ones, it was all fine — but it was definitely a bumpy road, especially in the beginning.
Undomesticated: Yet, despite your big successes — KhamAid was awarded some serious money from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), not just once but twice — you also experienced setbacks throughout the years. What would you do differently with KhamAid if you could rewind to the 1990s?
Traveling to Pusarong Temple with KhamAid volunteers.
Logan: At first, the way I chose projects was what a lot of people derisively call “NGO tourism.” You find a remote village and want to travel there. Then, once you get there, you find it to be very beautiful and you love the people and want to help them. So I traveled to a dozen or more different villages and towns, and too much of my resources were expended just getting to these places, and too little was expended in trying to help people.
The opposite way of doing it is where you choose one place and really focus on it. If you do that — and in China in particular, but also really anywhere—you’re hostage to the local officials. We worked with local officials in the education bureau and at the schools. If the leadership in those institutions changes, then you can have a lot of trouble.
So, for the reasons I just stated, I'm not sure that narrow geographic focus is always the smartest strategy. Instead, I’d focus on subject matter, such as books, maternal health care, or job training. Once you get up to speed you can really make a big difference in those areas. So I would probably do that if I were going to do it again. But I will say, I was also hostage to our donors, who had varying interests. They, too, were all over the map, so it was not easy to get money for something I wanted to do. Sometimes I had to earmark money for a specific cause because it was what the donor wanted.
Undomesticated: Given the hardline stance of the Xi government, the 1990s now seem like an era of unique opportunity for advocating change and progress. It was after Tiananmen but before the great wealth of the 2000s. If you wanted to go back to Kham now and open an NGO, do you think you could do it?
Logan: I think I could, because I still have some friends and contacts out there, and one's effectiveness in starting an NGO is very closely tied to who you know. In today’s environment, it's become very difficult to register a new NGO in China. Also, operating anywhere in Tibet is definitely sensitive. So, going big and trying to be official is probably impossible these days. But if you go small and under the radar and work with people you know, then you can accomplish a lot of good things.
Undomesticated: Do you feel like you went under the radar in the 1990s?
Logan: We worked very transparently with the Foreign Affairs Office in Ganzi Prefecture, and they knew everything we were doing. Today that might not work. But we weren’t registered in China and didn’t have a Chinese bank account for KhamAid. So we were under the radar in a lot of ways, but we also were very forthright with our Chinese government partners. Today, it would probably be wise to just work in the background with local people and institutions.
Undomesticated: What other advice do you have for other women who dream of starting NGOs in remote areas?
Logan: I would start by reading my book to see how I did it, because I think there are many things I did which anyone would need to do — namely, finding local contacts. Like I said, it's who you know and how you partner up with influential people in whichever country you want to operate. A lot of idealistic young people want to do NGO work, and that's wonderful. But also know that you're going to be poor. This is a lifestyle that you will love, but it’s not going to make you much money. It's also very difficult to find a romantic partner if you are running overseas all the time. I have to say that that really enhanced my loneliness and some of my less-than-great choices in the romantic sphere.
I also think you need skills to schmooze with people you meet, and certainly the discipline to keep your contacts alive and close and to communicate with them often. Raising money is a perpetual challenge, and unless you have a sweetheart donor with deep pockets, you will spend probably two-thirds of your time raising money. If you want to be in that country and you want to live there full-time running an NGO, I don’t think leading your own NGO is the best way. Instead, I would suggest trying to get a job as a field worker in an existing NGO. That notion may burst a balloon for a few people, but it's important to know going into this field.
Undomesticated: That's great advice because people need to understand that fundraising is a big part of the job.
Logan: It was hard for me, and I don't think anybody really loves it. But you’re going to have to do it if this is your chosen life. It’s not something to be underestimated for people who want to take this path.
Undomesticated: Circling back to what you mentioned above about the romantic sphere, you write about your relationship with a Tibetan man named Sögyal and how you were reluctant to get involved because he was quite a bit younger and you worried he would not respect feminism. But as I learned in your book, despite the age difference and the fact that he ended up marrying a local woman, as was expected of him, you don’t regret your relationship with him. From him, you learned firsthand about why remote hospitals and medical clinics so urgently need critical supplies. You and he both spoke Mandarin, so could communicate well.
You also note that many of the Western women you met there felt intrigued by Tibetan men even if they didn’t speak a common language, that they hoped the relationship would offer them an inside look on Tibet: “Yet the most bewitching elixir Tibetans can offer is entrée to their magical kingdom.” I find this to be true in many cross-cultural relationships when the pair comes from such different backgrounds. There’s so much idealism at first, but sometimes it doesn’t last. For instance, my mainland Chinese ex-husband accused me of marrying him to keep a connection to China and admitted to doing the same when it came to the U.S. Talk about dysfunction. From what you learned about your time in Asia, do you have advice for women in cross-cultural relationships?
Logan: I think cross-cultural relationships are harder than relationships you form within your own culture. The very first difficulty is the idea that by having a relationship with this person you're going to sort of gain entry into, as I said in my book, that magical kingdom. This is particularly true of people in developing countries. They want to gain entrée into our magical kingdom, and so you have two sides yearning to be in each other's countries, and that is not a very good foundation to figure out if you're actually compatible and if you can love each other and be with each other for the long term. That's a very problematic way to start a relationship.
So I would advise anybody who is contemplating such a relationship to spend a lot of time getting to know each other as individuals.
Also, as a woman marrying into a foreign culture, it’s very difficult to develop any kind of kinship with the other wives in your new community because you're going to be too different from them. Even if you speak their language, it's very tough to break into a social sphere like that. So that's a lonely thing. Meanwhile, if the man comes to the United States, not only can he not easily mingle among native-born men, but because of his outsider status, he's going to also suffer a loss of prestige. He might have to do work that doesn't confer the same status he had where he came from. That can lead to a lot of unhappiness down the road. I think people who are engaged in cross-cultural relationships need to give serious thought to those challenges before they commit.
Undomesticated: Can you point us to any NGOs currently working in Kham or other remote areas inhabited by Tibetans?
Logan at Gyalten Rinpoche's school, founded by an incarnate lama.
Logan: Yes, and they are not so far under the radar that they don't have websites! One is the Surmang Foundation (surmang.org). They have been running a clinic in a remote area in Qinghai Province for more than 30 years. They've been very effective by building partnerships with local government officials and have really made a huge difference in reducing infant mortality and maternal mortality as well as addressing all kinds of healthcare needs. As I've said in my book, these needs are really acute and tremendous. So they do great work and are based in Colorado.
Another one is called Children of Tibet (childrenoftibet.org). It’s a smaller organization and is relatively new. It's run by a friend of mine who has some grassroots connections with Tibetans in Tibet. They help move money to Tibet to fund scholarships and other kinds of small but very meaningful and effective programs.
A lot of people say things to me like, “I don't want to support any projects in Tibet as long as China is in charge.” I think that's really unfortunate. There’s a lot of need, and Tibetans will still be themselves no matter who's in charge. So I would say don't wait, because honestly, it's going to take a very long time to see Tibet as an independent country. I'm not expecting that in my lifetime, and I would settle for China itself becoming a more democratic, more open, more free society. I think that would be a big win.
Undomesticated: Lastly, with COVID, I've noticed there are some people who volunteer for charity work or nonprofits for the wrong reasons. For instance, they say they want to help women and children, but when it comes down to it, they’re violating COVID safety measures to put on pretty presentations in-person. So I wonder if they’re just trying to elevate themselves into some type of superiority complex. Have you experienced that?
Logan: For starters, what you describe is certainly not good. But I will say that, as somebody collecting money to do humanitarian assistance, you're asking people to write a check, and they will get nothing back from it except warm fuzzies. I tried to show our donors how they helped by showing them pictures, reports, and so forth. But still, you're in a transaction where there's cash flowing one way, and there's nothing but an idea going the other way, and if that idea is used to make people feel good, I think that's fine. That is what it should do, and if it doesn't do that, then people aren't going to donate.
Just as an aside, now the American tax system has been restructured and they've basically taken away the charitable deduction unless you donate really huge amounts of money. So now donating is a far more pure thing. I don't know how that's affecting nonprofits in the U.S. It’s probably not a good thing for them, but at the same time, when I donate, now I feel like my motive is purely wanting to help, wanting to make a difference, not to reduce my taxes. I wouldn't say there's a wrong reason for supporting or doing charitable work. We all do it because it makes us feel good. And whether that's a selfish thing or an unselfish thing, I don't know.
Compassion Mandala, Logan’s memoir on her experience in Tibet.
There are going to be people who are a little foolish or wrongheaded and disorganized in every field of endeavor, and that's certainly true in charity work. So it's a good idea to seek out charities that are well-organized and smartly run and do all those good management things that a for-profit company needs to do to deliver its product to its customers. There are great ones and not-so-great ones. I'm not sure that you get a really accurate picture of great versus not-so-great from a number, like the amount spent on overhead. Sometimes doing good work requires a lot of overhead because you need smart people on your payroll and you need to keep them a long time so they get even smarter.
Undomesticated: Do you have plans to write more books?
Logan: I am gathering in my head notions of a science fiction book about Tibet. That's a long way off. I don't know if I'll have time for that until after I retire from my day job as an aeronautical engineer. But I’m dreaming up some wonderful ideas about it.
Undomesticated: Thank you so much, Pam. It was really great chatting and learning more about your work in Kham.
