The German Embassy in Beijing provided 40,500RMB which, combined with a 2,000RMB local contribution, purchased 20 grain threshing machines for the poorest Tibetan households in Zhangda Village, Yimu Township, Luhuo County, Ganze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province, PR China. This project has given new life to, particularly, women and girls, who are culturally bonded to threshing tasks that are truly difficult and require great effort. Villagers will begin using the machines in mid September 2008. However they have already changed their way of carrying out farming tasks. In the past, families without threshing machines helped families who had machines to weed their fields and do other farm work. This was in order to be able to use the richer families' threshing machine to thresh their own grain. At times, this resulted in these poorer families taking their children out of school to do this work. This project has ended this practice. The project has also increased family income: Mtsho lha (b. 1972), a mother of four (the oldest child is eight years old), confided that this year she wouldn't need to ask her husband to return home to help her with threshing. In the past, every year during the threshing period, her husband returned to help his wife with threshing, directly reducing the family's annual cash income. He earns 35-50 RMB a day, and if he is absent for three months, this amounts to about 3,600 RMB; approximately the average annual cash income of one village family. The project also promotes community harmony. Hatred between families and gossip about poor families were unavoidable in the past during the threshing period. Before the project, the village had only four threshing machines. There are a total of 100 households in the village. The poorest and least powerful families had to wait the longest time to use the machines and few families were willing to help them, causing great emotional suffering. This project utterly changed this: Poor families now no longer need to wait for other families to finish threshing and the gap between poor and rich no longer exists during the threshing period.