TWO nuns who fled their Tibetan homeland to escape Chinese oppression are about to return to their nunnery in India after spending the last six months in Ripon.

Ngawang Donsel, aged 18, and 24-year-old Thamcho Dolkar came to England to learn the language, plus basic computing and nursing skills.

Mrs Patricia Whaling of Bishopton Lane, Ripon, who helped to organise their visit, said it had proved a tremendously rich learning experience for everyone involved.

The idea of a Ripon community project to help refugee Tibetan nuns was the result of a Ripon resident's experience of teaching English in Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile in the Himalayan foothills of northern India.

The exiled community includes about 1,000 nuns, many of whom suffered imprisonment, torture and other forms of persecution at the hands of the Chinese authorities in their homeland.

Like Ngawang and Thamcho, they braved the hardships and deprivations of a Himalayan crossing to find the freedom to practise their religion. But their nunneries are extremely poor and overcrowded, and the Tibetan Nuns' Project aims to help them.

It was under its auspices that Ngawang and Thamcho came to this country, and by the end of their stay next weekend the people of Ripon expect to have raised enough to send them home with a computer for their nunnery.

Ngawang entered a Tibetan nunnery at age 15, high in the mountains above Lhasa. "The Chinese came to the nunnery and forbade us to have any pictures of the Dalai Lama and said he was bad," she wrote. "I decided to go to India to see the Dalai Lama and to study. I did not tell my parents or my grandparents because they might have tried to stop me."

She ran away with £3, and travelled by truck for a day and a night, then set off on foot across the mountains. She slept in a cave.

"Later we travelled with nomads and slept with the sheep. We had very little food or water."

One man died on the journey after jumping into a river when he thought the Chinese were coming. She was very relieved to reach the nunnery in India.

Thamcho told a similar story. She had no education in Tibet because she had to help her parents. She, too, became a nun at 15, but wanted to read and write like the others.

She ran away with only the clothes she stood up in and about £1. She walked for three days, then spend six days in a truck to reach Lhasa. She eventually fled the country with her young nephew, claiming he was her son.

She walked for seven days, mostly at night to escape detection.

"We had no blankets and it was very cold. We had very little food and we were hungry and very afraid.

"Some of the time we walked through snow and it was very difficult and my shoes wore out. We had to wade through rivers up to our waists."

She, too, told of her relief at reaching freedom and eventually arriving in Dharamsala. "I saw the Dalai Lama and only then could I relax and be happy."

In Ripon they have stayed with host families, supported by fundraising in the community.

This week they are at a London monastery, seeing the sights before heading back to India to share their new-found skills with their colleagues.