I’m twenty-six and I have just learnt to dress myself. I’m referring, of course, to putting on my gho, the national dress and attire of all male civil servants in Bhutan (the female version is the kira). The gho is essentially one big piece of material with two small ties on one side. By shaking and pinching, wrapping and folding behind your back in a highly specific way, you hitch this up to just below the knee and then tie it with the kera, a slightly stretchable cloth belt that you use to keep this arrangement in place for the day. I can have the operation over in as little as three or four minutes, though on bad days it can extend to half an hour.
The final part of this exercise was an impenetrable mystery to me for the first month. I sheepishly waddled next door each morning to get my neighbour Mr Ngawang’s help with dressing myself. He was always such a good sport about it, shaking his head and clucking amiably, and only a few times stopping frozen in shock with spoon halfway from plate to mouth at the state I presented myself in. ‘Good morning, Mr Ngawang, I was wondering whether you would be able to help me with my gho…”
It wasn’t until I managed to purchase a mirror from Dagapela on the way back from meeting district officials in early March that I managed to actually see what was going on back there. Ngawang was right. It was a mess.
Now, however, I can strut proudly up the path from my quarters to the main buildings, gho billowing in the morning sunshine, students standing dutifully aside. It adds a different flavour to your days to look like a Jedi knight.
The teacher-student relationship is starkly different here. Students will plaster themselves against walls in deference to you. The class rises as one when you enter the room and thanks you in chorus at the end of class. I find it quite embarrassing having students bowing as I pass, covering their mouths as they speak to me or asking my permission to enter the classroom. But then again I come from a rather irreverent country.
The Power Distance Index is a measure of respect for authority devised by a social psychologist named Geert Hofstede in the 1960s and 70s. It is still maintained by the organisation that bears his name. It ascertains, through standardised surveys across a range of countries, how much status is accorded rank in a culture and the degree to which underlings will defer to their superiors.
According to the most recent iteration or world rankings I could find, New Zealand inhabits the fourth to bottom spot, beaten at sticking it to the man by such petulant nations as Denmark, Israel and Austria but being ruder than absolutely everybody else. With a PDI score of 22, we are considerably less reverential than the UK (35), Australia (36) and the United States (40). According to the hofstede centre (no capitals), “New Zealand scores very low on this dimension… communication is informal, direct and participative.” As the historian Keith Sinclair said, we have a “distaste for privilege”.
In contrast, the upper echelons of the index are dominated by the famously decorum observing Asian countries, with Malaysia topping the list. Bhutan jostles in the leading pack with a creditable 94. “Bhutan definitely has a hierarchical society,” the organisation writes, “This means that people accept a hierarchical order in which everybody has a place and which needs no further justification… subordinates expect to be told what to.” This translates into an awfully pliant student body with a reluctance to share their own opinions. Many of my students for the first few weeks wore a facial experience I would describe as ‘scared shitless’. I’m making some progress at massaging some discussion out of them, but it is slow.
For my part, I prefer it our way. While the frequent challenging and sometimes sullen reluctance you encounter in a New Zealand classroom can be tiring, I’m not sure if unfailing compliance is too much better. People have to earn respect where I come from. Orders have to be justified. It isn’t just that banter with students is a lot of fun, it’s that it is one of the checks and balances in our culture that constrains too much incompetence or tyranny in positions of importance.
After walking up to school we have morning assembly. The students stand observantly in straight lines on the grass in front of the school buildings and sing morning prayer. Following this a boy and then a girl anxiously shuffle to the whitewashed concrete podium and squeak out daily readings of essays on the glory of the Kingdom of Bhutan or soporific speeches the king once gave to a graduating class of dental hygienists or special education teachers. Behind them banners gently ripple in the breeze proclaiming 2015 a ‘National Reading Year’, as declared by the king and extolling the virtues of reading.
They finish, in a barely audible mumble, with ‘finally I would like to say thank you and that reading makes man perfect so let’s all read’, and scurry off in relief. The daily announcements follow (‘All scouts are to meet at the basketball court after period eight’, ‘Dorji Wangchuk please report immediately following assembly to explain his absence in morning study today’) The students are then lectured for a while by the principal while the staff, lined up facing the students, restlessly shift from foot to foot. Lastly the national flag is unfurled on the flagpole, the national anthem sung and students disperse to their classrooms.
While all of this is happening a dog wanders in, yawns, scratches behind its ear, and then lies down to nap in the sun. Nobody notices. During assembly there will routinely be three or four dogs sunbathing immediately next to the speaker, occasionally flicking at flies or wandering across to bury their nose in another dog’s arsehole, and it is like they aren’t even there. And dogs here love to lick their balls. During morning assembly, throughout prayers and while hosting dignitaries, a dog happily slobbering over his privates is a part of the scenery.
That is because dogs are absolutely everywhere in Bhutan. Almost no one keeps them as pets. They howl to each other at night and they roam in packs around their territories. One of the prescribed novels for every student in Bhutan is called Dawa: The Story of a Stray Dog in Bhutan. Thimpu’s stray dogs are one of the first things noted in visitor’s travelogues. During orientation, every single evening around bedtime twenty or thirty dogs congregated in the carpark opposite our hotel to bark stupidly at each other. Culling them, the control method many other countries use, faces resistance in this overwhelmingly Buddhist country.
Fifteen or twenty converge at meal times outside the school hall below my quarters. The students are served their rice and lentils in their stainless steel plates, and eating with their hands they loiter on the basketball court, chatting and cheerfully tossing pinches of food to the dogs.
Everywhere I have been in Asia I have seen dogs. The World Health Organisation reckons there are 200 million stray dogs worldwide. In Bali alone, there are an estimated 500,000 and there are apparently 200 strays in every square kilometre of Bangkok. Our neighbours, India, have 35 million of them.
The dogs here are a fairly ragged lot. Their ribcages protrude and most are missing clumps of hair. Some have open scars. And they must be riddled with parasites. I’ve read that dogs in the North carry a sort of tapeworm that kills more yaks than snow leopards, their natural predator.
Besides this, even though they are ragged and mangy, there is still something uplifting about dogs. Though about fifteen people have died of rabies in Bhutan since 2006, the dogs here are a relatively docile lot. Unlike cats, whose sneering tends to exacerbate your own frustration on a crummy day, there is something uncomplicated about a dog, even a stray one. There is no other side to a dog, other than what you see. Haggard as they are, I am quite happy to have them around.
I arrived here in the middle of the dry season. The monsoon-dry season cycle extends all across the tropics. I have barely seen rain a half dozen times since I left New Zealand for Vietnam in December, and never for more than twenty minutes. This makes Drujeygang a dusty place this time of year. The football field is nothing but dust. Fortuitously, my gho is also a lovely dark grey, perfect for displaying dust in all its refinery. It does the same trick with chalk, which floats down off the blackboard as I write to lightly decorate my shoulders and shows up in stark finger smudges when I reach into my pocket or adjust my gho.
I don’t know how the other teacher’s do it, but they seem to keep themselves and the chalk comfortably separated. It is irresistible to me and my garments. Then again I don’t know how other people don’t spill food on themselves either. I navigate my days as a series of tiny discoveries of food and toothpaste in discrete, well-placed spots on my garments. I’ve become expert at covertly spitting onto a finger and disguising the stain by massaging it deeper into the fabric. Dressing I can do, eating I’m still working on.
However the weather is changing and the monsoon is certainly on its way. When I first arrived and the sun dropped below the hills above town there was a chill in the air. I was wearing thermals at night. Now I am in a t-shirt. Already the fruit on the papaya tree outside my door are beginning to ripen.
The first piece of work I asked for from my students was an essay on struggles they have faced in their lives. The most common was walking to school for two or three hours each day, and then being completely cut off as the rivers flood during the monsoon. Many also mentioned the snakes, which come out of hibernation once it starts to heat up. Almost everybody I have talked to has mentioned the snakes.
But while I still can and the roads have been in good shape I have been going for runs in the evening. The road leads down out of town past the archery range. It clings to the side of the valley, gently undulating. Below it, through the perpetual light haze, are houses with small plots of land. From time to time I pass trudging students with bags of books and day labourers carrying machetes returning home.
There is a corner I reach where I slow down and start to creep on the soft sand at the side of the road. Just beyond it is a scree slope on which monkeys feed at the end of the day and I try to catch them by surprise. Usually a sentry high up in the trees sees me and by the time I round the corner they are scuttling up vines and into the branches. They sit and watch me and I stand and watch them back.
When I get to a fork in the road I turn and run back towards Drujeygang. Sometimes I stop at a place where a slab of rock juts out over the edge of the bank and I wait and survey the valley and the farms and the little houses below and I listen to the birds call to each other in the jungle. Then I turn and run back to town.
References
- Kate Sweetman, ‘In Asia, Power Gets in the Way’, Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2012/04/in-asia-power-gets-in-the-way/
- Erin Meyer, ‘Power Distance: You can’t lead across cultures without understanding it’, Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2014/09/25/power-distance-you-cant-lead-across-cultures-without-understanding-it/
- J. C. Kennedy, ‘Leadership and Culture in New Zealand’, June 2000, Lincoln University, Canterbury, Commerce Division Discussion Paper No. 88
- Sinclair, K. 1969. A History of New Zealand (2nd ed.). Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books. p. 285
- http://www.clearlycultural.com/geert-hofstede-cultural-dimensions/power-distance-index/
- the hofstede centre: http://geert-hofstede.com/bhutan.html; http://geert-hofstede.com/new-zealand.html
- Passang Norbu, Kuensel, ‘Street dogs- They’re back… and they mean business’, May 22nd 2013
- Brandon McPhail, ‘300,000 Stray Dogs Roam the Streets of Bangkok’, Digital Journal, http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/273918#sthash.rLHYYNHh.gyKmWafw.dpuf
- ‘Stray Dogs to Become Pariahs in Rabies War’, Jakarta Globe, August 14th, 2010, http://thejakartaglobe.beritasatu.com/archive/stray-dogs-to-become-pariahs-in-rabies-war/391101/#sthash.rLHYYNHh.gyKmWafw.dpuf
- Anna Leach and Anna Scott, ‘Taming Bhutan’s Dog Population’, The Guardian, 2nd May 2014,
- Anna Leach, ‘Animal welfare: why dogs are a development issue’, The Guardian, 2nd May 2014
- ‘Vet Trek: Treating Dogs and Saving Snow Leopards’, Bhutan Foundation, http://www.bhutanfound.org/gid)
