Tse Rang Tso

My name is Tse Rang Tso. I was born in 1983. I come from a hard-working nomadic family and grew up surrounded by beautiful snow capped mountains and a vast grassland. My village’s name is Oko Village, and it is situated in Xiaduo Township, Guinan County, Hainan Prefecture, Qinghai Province. I grew up in a single parent home. There are seven people in family: my grandma, mother, four siblings and me.

In high school I studied Science. After I graduated I changed my focus to humanities. I started to study English as my major, and have been studying it now for three-and-a-half years.

My hobbies are dancing, reading, traveling and listening to traditional Tibetan love songs. I feel that Tibetan love songs are really meaningful and emotional. During my studies in college, I have been involved in many projects, such as the Plateau Music Project, Plateau Photographers, and my own small-scale development projects. Now I’m a member of Shem Women’s Group, which is a non-for-profit organization training Tibetan women to manage projects aimed at reducing poverty and improving women’s lives. In 2006 I managed a solar cooker project, and a second-hand clothing project in Oko Village. Now I’m preparing proposals for two other projects: one for hand tractors to transport water and one for solar panels.

Through my photography I aim to show people what everyday life is like in my village. Conditions there are different compared with other Tibetan areas. I have begun using photography to document my development projects. I hope that the images you will see here will be useful in helping me to secure funding for my hand tractor project. If people had hand tractors in Oko village, then it would be possible to collect more water that is cleaner than the river water, in less time.