M.D SEX SCANDAL: Porn doc's parents fled Tibet home They encouraged their children to find careers to help others. Kelly Pedro, Crime Reporter The London Free Press 2004-07-23

 M.D SEX SCANDAL: Porn doc's parents fled Tibet home

They encouraged their children to find careers to help others.
Kelly Pedro, Crime Reporter
The London Free Press
2004-07-23


"Pencho and Tsering (Rabgey), they've been the backbone of the Tibetan community in Lindsay. They're just a great family." Max Radiff, family friend

Almost 45 years ago, they fled their homeland of Tibet, running from the Chinese army to safety in India.
The story of Dr. Tenzin Rabgey's parents -- Pencho and Tsering Rabgey -- is one of a harrowing escape from the only home they knew to an inspiring new life in Canada where they encouraged their three children to find careers in which they could help others.

Their lives reached tragic lows last month when Tenzin, 32, their only son, was charged by London police with possessing child pornography and killed himself a day later.

On Wednesday, police revealed the computers they seized from the young physician's downtown apartment contained hundreds of thousands of child porn images.

Police also found two photos of the anesthesiologist inappropriately touching a city woman during surgery at the London Health Sciences Centre a year ago.

It has left close family friends and Rabgey's colleagues in disbelief.

Friends of the Rabgey family said Pencho and Tsering Rabgey fled Tibet in 1959 as the Chinese army invaded.

At the time, Pencho Rabgey, a monk, acted as a bodyguard to the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual and political leader.

Pencho Rabgey told the Globe and Mail in 1997 he had studied as a monk for 20 years in Tibet. The article, focusing on Canadian Tibetans who were extras on the set of the Hollywood film Seven Years in Tibet, recounted Pencho and Tsering's nine-day escape to India.

Once safe in India, Pencho Rabgey met and married Tsering, who fled Tibet in 1960. Their daughters, Losang and Tashi, were born in a refugee settlement.

In 1971, Canada began accepting Tibetan refugees and the family moved to Montreal, where Tenzin was born. But they discovered a Tibetan community was just beginning to take root in Lindsay and settled there.

In Lindsay, Pencho and Tsering were factory workers, said Dr. Rakesh Bhandari, a former teacher and friend who knew Tenzin for about 10 years.

The family had little money, he said, and bought an abandoned house, which they worked hard to renovate.

More than 30 years later, they are one of the community's most important families, said Max Radiff, a close family friend and former Lindsay mayor.

"Pencho and Tsering, they've been the backbone of the Tibetan community in Lindsay," he said yesterday.

"They're just a great family. I've always been proud to know them and to be associated with them."

As one of the first Tibetan families in Canada, the Rabgeys founded the Potala Tibetan Dance Troupe in 1975. The troupe travels Canada and the northeastern U.S. performing traditional Tibetan dances.

In 1987, the family returned to Chungba, the isolated Tibetan village in the southeastern province of Kham that Pencho Rabgey used to call home. The Rabgeys set up the Shenpen Fund, a non-governmental organization that, according to its website, provides bare necessities to communities in Tibet. Shenpen helped build the Chungba primary school that teaches literacy skills and provides meals and clothes to more than 200 children. It was the first functioning school in the remote mountainous area.

The Rabgeys spend enormous amounts of time fundraising for the school, Radiff said. They oversaw its construction and constantly raise funds on its behalf.

"Their whole life is dedicated to serving the people in Tibet," Bhandari said.

"They're doing selfless work. They basically sacrificed their own personal fortunes to look after people that are less fortunate than them."

Education has been a foundation the Rabgeys always worked hard to promote.

Pencho Rabgey, a Tibetan scholar, regularly returns to a monastery in northern India to teach and learn, said Radiff.

He is also a founder of a school of Tibetan monks in northern India, where many exiled Tibetans live.

"They're always going back to India to help out the Tibetan community," Radiff said.

The family's emphasis on education appears to have rubbed off on their children.

Losang, a Commonwealth scholar, was the first Tibetan woman in the west to obtain an advanced degree. Tashi was a Rhodes scholar who attended Oxford University and still studies at Harvard. Tenzin was a Canada scholar with an undergraduate degree from the University of Waterloo. He graduated from the University of Western Ontario's medical school in 1997. He specialized in anesthesiology and worked at all three London Health Sciences Centre campuses.

Colleagues recalled his sunny disposition, caring and hard work.

The young doctor had not only travelled to Tibet with his family, but also to Honduras to do charity work. That trip was with a group of local doctors and nurses still struggling to understand how a man they admired could later be charged with child pornography and eventually commit suicide.

Without Tenzin here to explain, friends say they're left without answers.






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