Tibetan Foothold is Dervla Murphy"s account of the day-to-day life in an orphanage for Tibetan children in the refugee camps of Northern India in the 1960s. Dervla vividly describes the children"s lives in squalor while a handful of dedicated volunteers do their best to feed and care for them, attempting to keep disease at bay with limited resources. Dervla"s heart-rending account is interwoven with her own observations on the particular cultural and social problems associated with trying to help a people who have lived in isolation from the rest of the world, and she becomes a perceptive witness to the inner realities and sometime inadequacies of aid work.