I’ve been busy. Real busy. I’ve fallen off the grid, if not the wagon. Last time I sent an email to you I was about to launch into summer break. Well, that happened. I went to the other end of the country to meet my foreign friends, partied, walked through some villages, came back West, partied some more and ate a hamburger in Thimphu, the capital city. On the night I got back to Drukjegang I sat at my desk and looked at my computer. It seemed hard to fathom that school started tomorrow and it would be another five months before I saw my friends again.
For that was the nature of my life in Bhutan. Few transitions can be as stark. I existed in two entirely separate social worlds: My Bhutanese one in Drukjegang and my Western one. The complete lifecycle of my Western one was squeezed into barely two weeks at the beginning of the year, two weeks in the middle and a week at the end. And yet those five weeks contained rather a lot. They were the only people on earth who could really understand the experience I was having.
Alongside it was my social life in Drukjegang. Because it is considered remote, most Bhutanese teachers try and transfer away, so it is mostly stocked with young new-graduates. I was therefore among more than a dozen English-speakers of around my own age who became the people in my life. We played football, drank and travelled together. I stayed with their families. That peer group was every bit as real to me as any other. It was the world I lived in and I cared about it very much.
Anyway, a couple of months after returning to Drukjegang from summer break my parents came to visit, which was lovely, and not a moment too soon. They brought me provisions from the developed world, chiefly tooth floss. The hundred meters I had bought with me had run out a month before and I had been reduced to reusing the strings of it I could find around my quarters. By that time the minty flavour was all gone, of course. They tasted more savoury.
Before they came I had some of my students carry my empty beer bottles in sacks down to the village for one of the shop owners to trade for one ngultrum a piece. I even cleaned my quarters especially for my parents’ arrival. Which is to say I got my students to clean it. They sloshed and scrubbed my concrete floors until they were pristine, even ruining one of my brushes from the vigour of their labour. I had them pay me for the brush, naturally.
After a week of hot showers in tourist hotels and exploiting mum and dad for all the alms-giving they had in them, I said goodbye to them in Thimphu where I picked up a couple of boxes of my books.
My book is the main reason I haven’t written you an email in so long. Near the middle of the year, around about the time I stopped sending you emails, I decided I would try and write a book. The Bhutanese English curriculum is unwieldy and outdated, absent any relevant Bhutanese texts and far above the level of Bhutanese teenagers, especially in rural areas. What is more, the purchasing policy of school libraries is seemingly random, mostly guided by the shininess of the cover or heftiness of the tome, so that they contain either simple children’s books or titles far beyond what the students can understand (including, I am not kidding you, a not-so-well-thumbed copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace). Most of the children’s parents can’t read or write.
So I decided to found the ‘Bhutanese Young Adult Literature for Second Language Learners of English’ genre. After I got back from summer break I put all other projects aside and sat down and wrote a short novel called Dorji, about a Class IX boy and his year at school, complete with all the tropes and clichés you know and love. There’s even a romantic arc through the book, though with the volume turned right the way down. Students are not allowed boyfriends and girlfriends, you see. If they are discovered (bearing in mind that many are as old as twenty), they are dragged in front of the principal to explain themselves. So my budding teen romance has all the trappings of hormonal entanglement, without the heavy petting. Like a Disney movie, you could say, with less sex.
After distributing the book came revision, and then exams, and I kept myself busy with marking and planning and playing football on the court after school and then it was time to leave Drukjegang. On the morning I left I took a plaintive walk in the early morning sun, sticking my head into the classrooms, walking past the swastika-shaped flower arrangement beside the Class IX block, up past the water tanks to the football field, through the empty boys hostel with its askew metal bunks and cold concrete floors and then picked up my pack and walked out into the village.
I rode on the back of a truck down the hill to the paved road to get on a bus to Thimphu to see the first foreign faces (aside from ma and pa) in five months.
I do miss Drukjegang, and my life there, and some of the ways it was different. For example, one of the first things I noticed when I came to Bhutan was how many children there were. It wasn’t because the Bhutanese have a lot of babies (I checked: their fertility rate isn’t much higher than New Zealand’s), it’s because they let them play outside.
This is something our news media has taken away from us in the West. As Michael Crichton wrote, “A mass media society offers its citizens many advantages but accurate understanding of risk is not among them.” In its effort to capture eye balls, the media sells itself by overstatement and scaremongering.
In the United States, at least, the chance of a child being abducted by a stranger is about a twentieth of the risk of drowning and a fortieth of the risk of a fatal car accident, and yet our instincts are so distorted that we have decided it is more urgent to keep our kids from ever encountering a stranger. Warwick Cairns, the author of How to Live Dangerously, calculated that if you wanted your child to get kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, you would have to leave them outside and unattended for 750,000 years.
Now only 10 percent of American children walk or bike to school, down from two-thirds forty years ago. Only 30 percent of children play outside compared to 70 percent a generation ago. Steven Pinker writes:
The historical increase in the valuation of children has entered its decadent phase… When 300 million people change their lives to reduce a risk to 50 people, they will probably do more harm than good, because of the unforeseen consequences of their adjustments on the vastly more than 50 people who are affected by them…
More than twice as many children are hit by cars driven by parents taking their children to school as by other kinds of traffic, so when more parents drive their children to school to prevent them from getting killed by kidnappers, more children get killed.
There is another cost to this bubble-wrapping and I wasn’t aware of until I came here. Besides ensuring your child has an attenuated childhood experience and bequeathing them with an unhealthy fear of the world around them, adults suffer too. Adults suffer because they don’t get to play with kids.
Here it is not uncommon for total strangers to pick up toddlers and kiss them on the forehead. Men can play with little children without it ever crossing anyone’s minds that something shifty might be afoot. When teachers bring their infants to school it is considered perfectly acceptable for them to be carried and cradled by any students that come by. You see the coldest, staunchest teachers turn to bubbles when around a little one. And you see it in the kids: They’re not terrified of unfamiliar adults. It’s really nice.
The ubiquity of children means that everyone has experience with raising children. I didn’t spend much time with really little children when I was growing up and often I feel kind of clueless around toddlers, because I haven’t had much experience. That is inconceivable in Bhutan, where you can barely walk outside without tripping over someone’s little offspring. Little children are just there. It is better that way.
Anyway, I was only peripherally aware of all the things I would miss as I left village life, as I rattled down the hill in the morning sunshine. That night I was in the capital, eating my first hamburger in months, then went out dancing with the other newly minted veterans of teaching in Bhutan to ‘Space 34’, Thimphu’s premiere nightclub. After a week of luxuriating in the Western trappings of Thimpu and a little light trekking in the countryside, I joined five other foreigners to go to the East.
To avoid being kicked out of Bhutan at the end of December, my friend Dan and I decided to stay on and volunteer at a winter camp in Mongar. It was set up by the King a few years ago for poor girls who would otherwise have had to spend their winter working to support their families and pay for the things they need for schooling. After camp they are given a sum of money to compensate for what they otherwise would have made breaking rocks and carrying dirt on the side of the road.
As teachers specialising in being foreign, our stated role was to teach English, though we only did that for a few hours a day. The rest of the time was spent playing games, singing and hanging out with the most humble, curious, kind and sincere human beings you will ever find. Every night there were concerts, which we exploited as a chance to perform in front of the World’s Most Supportive Audience. I could have gone up there and farted into the microphone, and they would have loved it. I didn’t though. Instead in the staff concert four of us played ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’ by The Beatles. It was exhausting, being at camp from eight in the morning until nine at night, but I can’t think of time better spent.
After three weeks of that, with moist eyes and wrenched hearts as we watched the buses of calling and waving girls leave to drive back to their districts, Dan and I found ourselves with a little more than three weeks to spend how we pleased. We had a lot of country to see and not long before our visas expired so we set about seeing as much as we could with rabid enthusiasm. We hiked and hitch-hiked all around eastern Bhutan, staying with many of the girls we had met at camp in their homes and villages. We walked through villages without roads and slept in altar rooms. Then we crossed the middle of the country, drove South and returned to my school in Dagana for a night before walking across country to the border and leaving Bhutan on the final day of our visas. We were smelly, tired and worn out, but also contemplative.
It’s difficult to really give a sense of what Bhutan is like. Serfdom was abolished in 1962. Money wasn’t introduced until the end of that decade. This at the same time as the United States was putting a man on the moon. While young people were turning on, tuning in and dropping out in San Francisco, Paris and Berlin, the Kingdom of Bhutan was introducing paved roads.
Yet look at it now. There is a substantial, outward-looking cadre of educated young people. Each year its schools churn out thousands of smart, motivated and worldly graduates. It produces its own broadcasting on two television channels. In 1960 the life expectancy was 37 years. Even in 1990 it was only 53. Now it is 68, and climbing. In a country with an annual GDP per person of not much more than US$2500, close to 90% of school-age children are enrolled in primary school. It is still no Shangri-La, but the progress that has been made is staggering.
At first the exhaustion of incessant movement kept me from connecting with the truth of my leaving Bhutan. Dan and I had spent the previous twenty-four nights in twenty-two different places. But hours later, after passing through the border gate into the riot of horns and people and squalor of India, I was sitting on a train. We had found a spot in a sleeper carriage heading towards Guwahati, from where I would fly the next day. Dan sat on the opposite end of the padded sleeping bench and we both lent against the open barred window watching as the afternoon turned into evening and we passed a northern India of shacks and tea plantations.
It gave me a chance to think. I’m going home, briefly, and then going somewhere else. For a year I have been embedded in my village, and in this country. My life was Drukjegang and its shopkeepers and children playing on the road and the weathered farmers that walked into the village to buy supplies. My life was my friends, either the Bhutanese teachers at my school or the Westerners scattered around villages in other parts of Bhutan. It was playing futsal on the court in the afternoon, morning prayer at assembly, the dogs outside my house, lunch at the canteen and the yellow lights from the farmers’ houses on the hillside at night.
And now I’m leaving that. I’m not taking anyone with me: not my Bhutanese friends, not the students who I care for, not the other Westerners with whom I made sense of the experience, none of the faces and voices that came in and out of my life in Bhutan. Soon I will be in another country, in another present moment, with another group of people. Soon that will be what I care about. I don’t quite know what that means.
References
- Crichton, Michael, ‘Panic in the Sheets (Dating in the Age of AIDS)’, Playboy, December 1991,
- ‘Kids hit by parents driving kids’ Skenazy, 2009, p. 176 in Pinker, Steven, The Better Angels of Our Nature, 2011
- Worden, Robert L.. "Roads". Bhutan: A country study (Savada, Andrea Matles, editor), 1991.
- UNICEF
