Tsering Wore Excess Baggage

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30836, 23 August 1965, Page 1

Tsering Wore Excess Baggage

(N Z. Press Association) AUCKLAND, Aug. 22. The smiling passenger given a V.I.P. send-off by friends and officials as he boarded a Sydney-bound plane at Whenuapai on Saturday wore a heavy sweater, a lumber jacket and two pairs of long trousers.

Tsering Topygal had not been feeling the cold—he just could not find room in his baggage to pack the odd pair of trousers and insisted on wearing them. The 12-year-old Tibetan boy.

! who was brought to New Zealand in March for an operai tion at Green Lane Hospital i to replace a faulty heart valve, i was on his way home to Northern India. With the presents he had been given and the clothes he had accumulated during his five months’ stay, he and his friend and interpreter, Lithang Derji, aged 26. filled their airline regulation baggage i allowance of 881 b besides the Ismail cases they carried with I them. I Among the gifts were a j typewriter and a watch bought I for “Tsetop,” as he has become known, from special donations to the Save the Chil-I : dren Fund, which paid for his i stay in New Zealand. The young Tibetan was

j grateful for the help and kindi ness he had received and be- | fore he left sat down to write —in English—a letter of [thanks. It said: “New ZeaI land good-bye. On Saturday I am going back to India. I have been happy here. Many persons have given me presents. I want to say thank you. Good-bye everybody, Tsering Topygal." Dorji W’anted him to change the “I” to “we" but Tsering ■ complained that this would : spoil his good writing. Dorji added as postscript. “I want to say good-bye and thank you everybody.” Tsering earlier had gone to Green Lane Hospital to say “Thank you" personally to the doctors and nurses who had helped to make him well.

With a camera given to him by his New Zealand “mother,” Mrs Dawn Miller, he took a photograph of Mr B. G. Bar-ratt-Boyes, the senior thoracic surgeon w ho led the team that carried out the operation. Mrs Miller and her husband have looked after the boy at their home in Scenic Drive, Henderson, since he left hospital three months ago. “They will see a change in him when he gets back. He has grown a lot and has learnt quite a bit,” Mrs Miler said. “He has recovered well, although we had to tell him not to run about so much w’hen he was playing football. Tsetop has promised to write to us and he said that he would like to come back and see us one day."