Families benefit from improved healthcare

Hearing the familiar sound of an automobile motor outside his courtyard, Kundrol, who was just finishing up a cup of tea in the sunshine, rushed to the gate.

First in sight was his grand daughter Dawa Drolkar, and a 2-month-old baby in her arms. Kundrol took the baby in his arms and gave her a big kiss.

Kundrol is a resident of Nachen town in the city of Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet autonomous region.

He said he is delighted with the fact that he is still very healthy in his 70s and is proud of being the senior member of a family of four generations.

“You could hardly find a four-generation family six decades ago when life was much harder and healthcare was poor,” Kundrol said.

Kundrol was born to a serf family in the late 1940s. His father died when he was very young and his mother had to work extremely hard to raise her four children alone.

“Insufficient food was the biggest challenge to my family,”Kundrol said.“We ate wild herbs if we were hungry and we were sometimes poisoned by some toxic plants.”

But life began to change in the late 1950s. He joined the army and found a job as a gardener in Lhasa.

He retired more than a decade ago and now has a monthly pension of more than 3,000 yuan ($460).

Dawa Drolkar, 29, is an employee at the local township government.

The mother of a son and daughter, Dawa Drolkar said she has no idea what life was like 60 years ago but she is quite satisfied with life at present.

“I have a big family with members caring about each other, and I have a decently paid job and a pleasant home,” Dawa Drolkar said. “You couldn’t expect more.”

The woman said that there are more four-generation families in the city of Lhasa and the rest of Tibet.

“I believe this is a result of the improvements in the quality of life and healthcare conditions over the recent decades,” Dawa Drolkar said.

According to the government of the autonomous region, the average life expectancy of residents in Tibet increased from 35.5 years in 1959 to 68.2 years in 2018. And the average life expectancy of Lhasa’s residents was 71.1 years in 2020.

Jamyang Wangchuk, 80, and his wife are the senior members of another four-generation family in Gyarong community in Lhasa.

The elderly man said he has a lot of friends of similar age.

“When we meet with each other, we always talk about the increasing life expectancy in Tibet,” Jamyang Wangchuk said. “We notice this is not only an increase in quantity, but also an increase in quality.”

When saying “an increase in quality”, Jamyang Wangchuk meant that people today have better education than his contemporaries.

Jamyang Wangchuk was educated when he served as a monk in a temple some 60 years ago. “It was impossible for ordinary families to send their children to school at that time,” he said.

He said his five sons and daughters all went to school and there are four university graduates in the third generation of his family.