The Dragon's Voice

by Bunty Avieson

  Despite these contributions, we still need more pictures for the magazine. Mal, Kathryn and I borrow a four-wheel drive and the office’s new SLR camera, and head off for two weeks into the centre of Bhutan, taking photos as we go. Freewheeling around the country is not the way foreigners usually travel about Bhutan and the bigger hotels turn us away, suspicious of what we are doing in their midst. We find beds in rustic family hotels, Kathryn often sleeping on a pile of cushions on the floor. They have no televisions, and sometimes no electricity, so each evening, by flickering firelight, Mal reads us a couple of chapters of the Harry Potter books before bed. The magic and spells that JK Rowling writes about seem entirely believable here, where locals tell of the demoness who lives in their valley, or the rock that holds their grandmother’s spirit, or the zombie rolongs that haunt villages.

  When we return to Thimphu, we hand over all our photos to Sushil, and he sprinkles them throughout the magazine. None of our pictures, however, seem strong enough for the front cover, so we go to Flickr, the place where tourists like to show off their images. Bhutan does not take a bad photo and there are dozens that could work. I send emails explaining my request for a cover image. Some people ignore me, one British man is offended I would even ask, but one person comes back with a yes. The photographer, Yeshey Dorji, is a Bhutanese tour guide turned professional photographer with a photo blog and six years’ worth of glorious images. I had been told there was no such thing as a professional photographer in Bhutan and yet here he is, strutting his stuff on Flickr. I email him and he personally brings in his image of a gorgeous young monk smiling whimsically at the camera. He would be honoured if we used it for the cover. No need for payment.

  While Sushil is laying out the magazine, Needrup comes into my office, grinning. He hands me an official-looking document with fancy seals, all written in Dzongkha. It looks impressive but I have no idea what it is. He explains it is from the Je Khenpo, the head of the monk body. He has written a foreword for the magazine. Needrup reads it out to me, translating as he goes:

  Today, because of materialistic and progressive development in science and economy in most parts of the world, people’s minds and thoughts are naturally diverging from the spiritual path. Consequently, it is common knowledge that as human society is increasingly afflicted by modern ills like conflicts, diseases, poverty, theft and murder, security, happiness and peace are dwindling.

  However, in our country Bhutan, the flourishing of the precious tradition of Buddha dharma has been the fount of peace, happiness and security. As a result of this sacred covenant, apart from a vibrant and verdant ecology, there is a wealth of kindness, compassion and a moral sense of poetic justice naturally rich in all the people.

  Because of these qualities inherent in our society, religious and political goodwill and success are increasing like the waxing moon. Therefore, there is little conflict, hunger and ailment. Since the security, happiness and peace we enjoy are comparable to ancient days of fortunate generations, Bhutan has become an object of global admiration and commendation.

  I see an immense benefit to the nation in Bhutan Observer’s initiative to bring out a magazine on the Buddhist theme. I commend the paper’s noble initiative and earnestly pray that the magazine is of great benefit to all human beings.

  Issued from Tashichhodzong on the 30th day of the 6th month of the Earth Female Ox year in the 17th Rabjung.

  Truelku Jigme Choeda the 70th Je Khenpo of Bhutan

  This is the ultimate seal of approval for our magazine. I am agog.

  17

  Dolma’s Story

  If the world practised what Bhutan preached, we might be in better shape. But despite the country’s aspirations, every day the newspapers show the kingdom has a long way to go to achieve its own ideals. Reality hurts. Health figures are published and the kingdom’s problem with alcoholism is laid bare. Corruption of high-level civil servants is revealed. A business consortium, including a royal in-law, is denounced for building dodgy roads. The royal is never mentioned, but newspaper readers know who it is and the story becomes a touchy subject. The Bhutanese do not like to see their heroes, particularly their royal family, diminished. It diminishes them all.

  I first hear about domestic violence through Fiona Stiedl, who volunteers at the new women’s shelter RENEW, which stands for Respect, Educate, Nurture and Empower Women. Fiona is a British psychologist and ‘trailing spouse’. Her husband works with Megan at the Dutch aid agency SNV, and she volunteers her services as a counsellor where she is allowed.

  RENEW was set up in 2004 by the youngest Queen after she travelled the country talking to women about the hardships of their lives, only to discover domestic abuse on an unimagined scale. RENEW estimates that a staggering 75 per cent of Bhutanese women are victims of violence in their own homes.

  After Fiona tells me this figure, I spend weeks trying to get my head around it. I bristle in an editorial conference as the male editors pontificate about Bhutan’s unique vision for Gross National Happiness. Three in four Bhutanese women might not be feeling so happy. I listen as the editors earnestly discuss poverty and the hardships faced by their rural cousins, and how they can find a way to help. Not these husbands, surely. I know wife-beaters don’t have signs tattooed on their forehead, but still. It just will not compute.

  Then one morning in February, our helper, Dolma, doesn’t come to work.

  Mal rings me at the newspaper to say she is in jail. She had a fight with her husband the previous night, police were called, and she ended up locked in a cell.

  He found this out from Dolma’s best friend, a young woman who works for our Dutch neighbour, Cecile. She tells us that Dolma’s husband is violent when he drinks, which is often.

  Cecile is a formidable woman who trained as a political scientist and could easily be Prime Minister of the Netherlands one day. She goes straight to the police station and gets Dolma out of jail. Once it becomes clear that Dolma is the injured party, the police do everything to help. They record an apology in the paperwork and haul in her husband, Arjun, for an official warning. The police captain berates him for his shameful behaviour. He tells Arjun to clear out his things from their apartment that afternoon.

  Dolma comes back to Tashi Pelkhil village and spends the afternoon sleeping in our spare room. When I come home from work she is sitting in our kitchen, shoulders slumped, looking broken. Her whole body sags. I give her a hug and she is trembling. She is so ashamed of spending a night in jail that she can hardly speak.

  Mal drives Dolma and her daughters home and walks them up the stairs to their apartment. It is locked from the inside. Arjun is home and at first refuses to let them in. Mal is polite but firm, and finally Arjun opens the door.

  Arjun is a driver at a diplomatic office in Thimphu. He is small-framed, well spoken, neatly dressed and utterly charming. He doesn’t look able to hurt a fly. Dolma tells us later that he is always like that to other people, which made her feel even more at fault and isolated.

  Arjun refuses, ever so politely, to leave, so Mal calls the police. When they arrive, the police captain – who is still appalled that his officers put a beaten wife in jail – orders him from the home. The captain writes down his own mobile number for Dolma. Any more trouble and she is to call him, day or night.

  The next morning Dolma arrives looking tired but determined. She asks if we can all sit down in the lounge room. She is tense, and it clearly takes enormous effort to hold herself together. She apologises but says she has to resign. She must go to Israel, where her sister works as a maid. Her sister will lend her money for the airfare and help her get a similar job. She hopes to send money home to educate her daughters.

  Mal and I listen in shock. She has made up her mind, she says. She has already told her daughters. They are upset and don’t want her to go, but she has to. Her husband is a violent drunk. She cannot rely on him. This is the only way she can see to
pay for her daughters’ education, to give them a future better than hers.

  Dolma was born in Thimphu to parents of Nepalese origin who were working on the roads. They were illiterate and did not register her birth with the village headman. That makes her part of a Bhutanese underclass, with almost no rights. When her beautiful daughters, who are bright and excelling at school, start Year 10, they will no longer be eligible for free education, because Dolma is not legally Bhutanese. She will have to pay, and to afford that she must go to Israel to work as a maid, like her sister.

  The idea that a mother must leave her children for a few years is devastating. One daughter is a year older than Kathryn, the other two years older. Leave them for a few years? Could I do the same, leave Kathryn for a few years? I know, in a vague way, that this happens. Europe is full of ‘helpers’ from Asia who send money to their families back home. More than 6 million Indonesians work as domestic help or labourers in overseas countries and send money home to their families. It is a figure that stuck in my head from a story I read recently. The number was shocking, and yet unreal. This is the first time a mother I know has sat on my couch and explained why leaving the children she so clearly loves – and leaving them in the care of a drunken, abusive father – is her best option. But without an education they have no future. This country has no welfare system or support mechanisms. Without legal rights or education, young women can face bleak choices.

  Dolma’s daughters are funny, bright and doing well at school. They are affectionate and respectful to Dolma, often standing with an arm draped around her shoulder. They love the Tashi books by Australian writer Anna Fienberg and JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, both on sale in Thimphu’s largest bookshop. And Dolma is a devoted mother. Every day while I am at work, she and Mal share news about their children. How they are going at school, what they are reading, the myriad things they do each day that enthral a parent.

  I see with stark clarity the powerlessness of an uneducated woman in a third-world country. But Dolma cannot leave her girls. That cannot possibly be good for anybody. Not her and not them.

  Dolma is not seeking our help or charity or pity. She is telling us because we are her employers and she is resigning. Effective immediately. She plans to leave for Israel as soon as her sister can send money.

  I suggest that she might be making a rash decision. Instead of going to Israel and leaving behind her children, there must be another way. We need to find out her rights. Even as I am saying it, I am aware it is a completely Western reaction. She looks at me blankly. Her rights?

  The options available to me as an educated, middle-class Australian are not available to her. I cannot change her world and I realise it would be unfair to imply that I could. I feel completely out of my depth, and suggest we see Fiona at the new women’s shelter – she will know what to do.

  RENEW is in an impressive new four-storey building on the edge of town, half hidden from the street by other buildings. Central but discreet. It could be a new hotel. A plaque outside commemorates the organisation being founded in 2004 by Her Majesty the Queen, Ashi Sangay Choden Wangchuck. Fiona meets us and brings a RENEW caseworker, a beautifully groomed young Bhutanese woman. The four of us sit in an office and listen as Dolma tells of her violent 16-year marriage.

  When Arjun was sober, he was charming – a good husband and father. When he drank, he spent all their money, told her she was worthless and beat her. She rubs her thigh as she talks, then explains that it constantly aches – the result of a beating seven months ago with a wooden roti stick, a thin rolling pin. She shows us bruises on her wrists and arms. As she speaks, every word seems to bring a wave of self-disgust, and tears drip off her cheeks onto her clasped hands.

  RENEW recently ran an advertisement in Bhutan Times with the message ‘Home is a place for love and happiness, not violence’, beside a disturbing picture of a child cowering in a corner while a man in a gho raises his fist to a woman who is shielding her face.

  But women like Dolma, who are uneducated, do not read newspapers. That the violence is not her fault is news to her. After 16 years of abuse, she has absorbed the blame for much of it. She is unaware that it is against the law for Arjun to beat her if he does not like his dinner. That the youngest Queen Mother has set up an organisation specifically to help women in the same situation is a bewildering revelation.

  RENEW is well funded and branches are opening up across the country. I am told that while there are men in powerful positions who champion the organisation, there are others who object to any interference in the home. Marriages, they say, are private business.

  Bhutan is where Australia was 30 to 35 years ago. Back then, domestic violence was a hidden crime, seldom reported. It was only in the 1970s, when second-wave feminists began to expose its extent, that the community addressed it. There is still a long way to go: recent statistics show that 23 per cent of Australian women have experienced domestic violence in their lifetime.

  In Bhutan, change is coming not from women’s liberation but from the government. It isn’t a grassroots movement, and it’s not even coming from the educated middle class. It is being imposed from the top, like democracy. Improving the status and protection of women is one of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, and the UN has provided funding for the Bhutanese government to create a National Commission for Women and Children (NCWC). Its head, Dr Rinchen Chophel, is a fierce advocate for women’s rights, appearing often on BBS and in the newspapers as he argues for the abolishment of traditions that disadvantage women. His current list of battles includes bolstering the rights of single mothers and shifting the legal blame from sex workers to their clients.

  Dr Chophel also set up the Woman and Child Protection Unit in Royal Bhutan Police. The unit is headed by Lieutenant Karma Rigzin, a well-known and highly respected figure in the country. Fiona tells me that the staff at RENEW just have to pick up the phone to her, and her officers will appear. She is known to ‘kick ass’. Her name comes up frequently in the editorial conferences at Bhutan Observer. Three of the four editors dated her and seem keen to mention it at every opportunity. I understand why when I see a photo of her posing in her police uniform with her male officers behind her. She looks beautiful. And tough.

  NCWC and RENEW advertise in the media, and the newspapers report on their work. The reporters interview abused women, changing their names and concealing their faces in photos as they detail heartbreaking stories.

  While the educated Bhutanese are shocked by the coverage, the limited penetration of newspapers means it is taking time for such an important message to filter through to all levels of society. But it is a start. Domestic violence is a boil that needs to be lanced. The result is painful and ugly, but necessary.

  It is clear that a contributing factor to the problem of domestic violence is alcohol. Bhutan has a strong culture of drinking. Cheap whisky is freely available in Thimphu shops, and every Bhutanese farmer knows how to brew ara, a potent liquor made from rice. It is served to guests on special occasions, warmed in a saucepan, with an egg floating in it. Ara is so much a part of rural culture that life without it is inconceivable.

  Fiona and the RENEW caseworker recommend that Dolma see the forensic doctor at Thimphu hospital to have her scars and injuries recorded in preparation for a divorce. Unless she can prove he is at fault, she will have to pay for the privilege of divorcing him. The forensic doctor is professional, kind and clearly used to seeing women like Dolma.

  He draws pictures of her injuries on a piece of paper, adds comments and clips it into a thick ring-bound folder, which he places next to a row of a dozen similar folders. ‘Battered Wifes’ is handwritten on each spine. Pinned to the walls are posters saying domestic violence is a crime. They are in English and Dzongkha, neither of which Dolma can read.

  I bump into a Bhutanese friend. She tells me she has been waiting next door for test results. In the past hour four ba
ttered women have visited this room. One had a savage bite mark on her arm. My friend shakes her head. ‘Her husband bit her,’ she whispers.

  Dolma takes a week off and goes to visit her parents, an eight-hour bus journey away. When she returns she is buoyant, like her old self. She had a wonderful break, she tells us. Her mother, who is paralysed, took a few steps on her own, so everyone in the family is rejoicing.

  Dolma told her parents she was divorcing Arjun. They thought that was a mistake and advised her she should allow him to return, even if just for a few years.

  She says it so cheerfully that at first I miss it. Her parents want her to go back to him? For a few years?

  Dolma explains that she doesn’t have Bhutanese citizenship. Even though she was born in Thimphu, to parents who were in the country legitimately, she is not registered anywhere and is thus considered an illegal immigrant. Nepal has refugee camps full of people who claim they are Bhutanese but cannot prove it and have been kicked out of the country. They are stateless. Dolma knows this could be her future. Living in a refugee camp, unable to help her daughters.

  Arjun, however, comes from a well-connected family, which is partly why Dolma’s parents think she is better off with him, violent or not. Arjun’s father was a decorated army officer, and Arjun himself has level-five citizenship, which will be upgraded in a few months to level four. This is when I first learn about the hierarchy around me – that Bhutanese citizenship covers five levels. Good for you if your family exists in level one – born in Bhutan to Bhutanese ancestors who owned land that was registered with the local government office and whose extended family has never been in trouble with the law or the government. That seems to be a rough definition of it: no two Bhutanese give me the same explanation and it quickly becomes clear that this is another conversation that is impolite for a foreigner to be having.