The cook has made green root mixed with mush-rooms, sauted potatoes, and turnips with fat pork. Almost all of food supplies were brought from a long distance, for there is nothing available here except tsampa, butter, yak meat, and tea. The conservators need the big room cleared so they can work. I relay this request to Xiong Xiong, who dispatches local laborers to carry out sacks of grain, cement, ritual implements, and other dusty objects. The building is still undergoing reconstruction, and it's full of the sounds of hammering and sawing.
Workers haul stones and clay up the steep staircase.
Logistics assistant Peng Jing, conservator Karen Yager, and student Tsering Pelo work for a couple of hours cutting sheets of gauze, which will be applied to the murals. Others arrange a work space on the monastery roof, and begin sanding clay from the back of the first painting. Xiong Xiong wants to call a couple of carpenters out from Dege. The carpenters we've got will leave in a day or two to plow their fields, he tells me. Donatella Zari says after the scaffolding is built we don't need any more carpenters.