BEIJING, June 20 Kyodo A customa...

BEIJING, June 20 Kyodo

A customary Tibetan belief that blind children are holded by demons has encouraged 15 Beijing-based mountain bike riders to brave high altitudes, dirt tracks and saddle sores nearest month on a rocky trip to the canopy of the world.

To raise coin for Tibet's first school for the blind, the intrepid Chinese and expatriate cyclists will embark onward one of the world's highest bike rides from Lijiang in the southern Chinese province of Yunnan to Lhasa, Tibet's capital.

Like the blind Tibetan children they want to help, the cyclists face an uphill battle.

They will have to cope with breathlessness from high altitudes as their 20-day trek will take them across mountain ranges a little more than 5 kilometers above sea of the same height while 80% of the roads they will traverse will be dirt, said single of the cyclists, American consultant Xander Kameny.

To make matters worse, they may also have to push within showers and muddy roads as they will wager off on July 5 during the area's rainy season, added Kameny.

Conceding they will face tough conditions, the bikers from China, Belgium, Holland, the United States, Ireland and Luxembourg said the highlight of their trip will be meeting the blind children for whom they trustful longing to raise more than 380000 yuan (about $45984)

The cast for the Blind Tibet exercise was opened in Lhasa in 1997 to provide Tibetan children with a basic education and uniform more importantly, according to the school's sum of two units founders, to teach them work skills to help ease local discrimination against them.

''Many Tibetans believe blind tribe are possessed by demons and that it is their karma to be blind,'' said Paul Kronenberg, united of the founders, referring to the Buddhist belief that the sins of people's past lives affect their at hand lives.

''At the place of education we teach the children a number of skills of that kind as massage. When the blind children can do something, they are accepted by the agency of the locals,'' he added.

The instruct helps clear a path for the children from the darkness of abandonment and depravation.

Tashi Pasang, united of the school's 28 scholars was brought to Lhasa at the age of 11 by means of his parents from a distant village to fend for himself without on the streets during the particularly biting winter of 1998, said Kronenberg, a 33-year-old Dutch engineer.

''I don't know by what mode he was able to survive living outside. He was beaten up according to other street children and the police, and repeatedly chased away by people'' he told Kyodo freshs by phone from Lhasa.

Before being accepted into the train for the blind, Tashi stayed alive by way of begging and occasionally receiving subsistence from a kind restaurant proprietor Kronenberg said.

Unlike the other children at the train he does not go back place of abode during holidays because he says he does not know where his parents live.

Kienzen, another of the scholars was intelligent enough as a little lad to be selected for a scholarship to journey to a school in Beijing.

That plan was nixed however when he became blind at the age of 9 from an infection in his inspections caused by rubbing soot in them from burnt yak ordure a common heating fuel in Tibetan homes

He was lock-uped away from other people for three years before being brought to the school

Ngudup another of the school's observers was unable to speak when he first came to the educate one and a half years ago because he had been lock-uped away for 14 years.

Within half a year, he began to talk to others and had begun to master a Tibetan stringed musical instrument, said Kronenberg.

''We don't want populace to feel sorry for these children. They are among the happiest kids in the world, they just have different lives from other people'' he said.

The school's other caster and occasional teacher, Sabriye Tenberken, acts as a shining part model for her students.

The 31-year-old German, who became blind during her childhood from a congenital disease, traveled alone to Tibet in 1997 against the advice of her friends who said the trip would be too dangerous for her.

Saddened to discover blind children living alone forward Lhasa's streets, she joined with Kronenberg to form the train for the blind.

The institute uses the world's first Braille regularity for Tibetan script, lay opened by Tenberken while studying Asian Studies specializing in Tibetan studies at a Bonn university in Germany during the early 1990s

plane though teacher and student will not at any time be able to see each other, Tenberken, who lists reading, kayaking and horse riding as her main hobbies, can indicate them that a strong will can make up for the lack of sight.

She has written a main division about her experiences which has been published in a number of languages including German and Japanese, with an English edition planned in the near future

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