Apparently the men don't have many either. EFL. It's August. Wait till you see what we get next week. It's evening in Shigatse and the lights are coming on. In the Chinese district of the Tibetan mountain town, strings of twinkling lights flicker around rows of shopfronts where women perch waiting for customers and men stumble out from backroom corridors.
It's good to know that the men stumbling out of backroom corridors aren't customers.
"There are a lot of prostitutes here. They're all from the countryside. Maybe they don't have parents to look after them or anything else to do," says Jirga, an 18-year-old vendor.
Boredom. Yeah, that's why I got in the business. Gave me something to do instead of lying around the house all day. At least a diferent place to lie around.
Hundreds of miles away in a nunnery in Tibet's capital, Lhasa, a group of young Buddhist nuns sit stitching yards of maroon cloth into the robes that are the iconic uniform of the clergy. "The life here is very good. If I wasn't doing this, I'd probably be a farmer," said nun Ani La, 30, speaking over the din of a thunderstorm that rolled in from the mountains. The Lhasa nuns and the prostitutes of Shigatse may have little in common on the surface,
but under the surface?
but both are part of the same demographic group -- young, rural, Tibetan women -- and analysts say their ranks are growing. As development draws herders and farmers to towns in search of wage labor, Tibet's women find themselves with few choices and little know-how for getting by in a market economy. "Often where there is a concentration of nuns there is concentration of sex workers.
I never heard about that from the kids who went to St. Teresa's. Maybe they were keeping it a secret from us Protestants and Jews.
The same forces are drawing young women away from villages," said Charlene Makely, a Tibet specialist at Reed College in the U.S. state of Oregon.
There's good money in being a nun? Who knew?