The government announces an inquiry into the deaths of the seven boys. When it comes out, four months later, it covers everything raised by the Solidarity March petition. Ultimately, everyone is absolved from responsibility. Nothing more could have been done for the boys. Everyone involved saves face, and when the report is presented to parliament, there is barely a murmur in response. The newspapers report the findings and quickly move on.
I don’t think anyone in Bhutan would consider the nation’s first public march to have been a success. It scared them, bringing the violent unrest that seems part of civic life in Nepal and India a little too close. With democracy comes new freedom, as well as power. The Bhutanese are testing this power and discovering its limits. This can mean going further than what they are comfortable with. And while the general public is figuring out the new parameters, so is the government and so is the media.
23
Getting Along with Elephants
In August the weather is moist and hot, and the land is fertile. The marijuana growing wild by the side of the road is taller than me and the sunflowers at Tashi Pelkhil are like bouncing smiley faces, nodding as we pass. The trees are heavy with apples and pears. Mal buys avocados at the market that are the size of small cantaloupes.
I feel a different sense of time. Everything feels like a long time ago, even when it was only yesterday. Time has stretched or bent or something. It is hard to put my finger on. I just know it is different. Philosopher Blaise Pascal famously said that all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. I find I am getting better at it and it is having an effect, which is inexplicable and rather lovely.
As our departure date approaches, we start our farewells, which in Bhutan are a protracted affair. It feels like everybody we have ever met invites us for dinner or a picnic or appears in my office with a farewell gift. Our landlords, Kinley and Choeden, invite us for dinner, which means walking across our driveway to their home next door. Kinley, who is handsome and 40-ish, has lived at Tashi Pelkhil village since he was seven and entertains us with stories of an idyllic childhood with his siblings, before roads or electricity. He tells of riding his horse down to the river and wading through rice paddies where our home now stands. But, he says, if we think Tashi Pelkhil has changed now, we will not recognise it in another year.
We have been noticing the building works going on in the barren wasteland over our fence, and heard through the maid network that the Goenling family was doing something big. But no-one has prepared us for just how big. Kinley explains that the General’s children are building an exclusive international-standard high school at Tashi Pelkhil, complete with football fields and a Japanese judo room. One sister plans to build an apartment block next to her home, to rent out to school families. The little bridge covered in prayer flags will not cope with all the new traffic, so the brothers will build a new, larger one to take cars and pedestrians directly from the expressway into a car park. They would like to build a hotel in the orchard. The high school will open in six months, and next week they will start advertising in Kuensel for teachers and a principal.
Mal and I are stunned. Our multicultural enclave, so sleepy and safe, will soon be abuzz with activity. We feel sad that the serene little village will be lost but have to admire their bravado. None of the family has any experience as teachers or in the education department, and yet they are starting a school. Phuntsho and Tenzin had no experience in the media, and they started a newspaper. This spirit of entrepreneurship is in the air. This is the time for Bhutanese who have ideas and the courage to have a go. The middle class is growing and so are the opportunities.
But the General’s family is not building a school just because it makes good business sense. Kinley and Choeden tell us they were sent to boarding school in India from a young age – Kinley at five and Choeden at six. Neither enjoyed the experience, feeling lonely and missing their families. They want to create a better experience for the next generation. Their vision is to provide world-class facilities so that parents who prefer a private education, and can afford it, do not have to send their children to board in Indian schools.
Kinley says the new school will try to pass on to students the values that the General has exemplified throughout his life. They have come up with a motto for the school: Veritas, humilitas, integritas. Truth, humility, integrity.
An American couple, posted here by the World Bank, will take over our lease the minute we leave. Our Dutch, Danish and Uzbekistani neighbours are also moving on over the next few months to new exotic posts, with new foreigners lining up to take over their leases. I feel how life constantly changes, everything shifting around, nothing standing still for a moment.
In the office I hear about yet another newspaper that is set to launch, this time aimed at the business community and owned by two Thimphu women – a successful businesswoman and a wealthy housewife. They start trying to poach journalists. Bhutan Today loses a few and so does Bhutan Times. Needrup and Rabi are both offered higher salaries but decline, saying their heart is with Bhutan Observer.
We start shedding belongings to fly home, and Mal presents his coffee machine to our neighbour Megan. The maids of Tashi Pelkhil are delighted and immediately embrace cafe culture, gathering at her home for their morning break, requesting their various preferences – latte, flat white, espresso.
The newspaper staff farewell us with a traditional Bhutanese picnic in a park outside Thimphu. Rows of hot dishes are lined up. Everyone, it seems, has brought their own family version of the national dish, ema datshi, made with chilli and cheese. We sample them all, tears streaming down our faces, agreeing that each one really is the best. Then Needrup makes a lovely speech, saying impossibly nice things, and we all get very drunk on Bhutanese whisky.
The maids of Tashi Pelkhil take us for a picnic at another park and Dolma gets teary, which makes me teary, which embarrasses our daughters completely. Dolma’s husband, in a sober moment, sends us a card thanking us for looking after his family.
We spend our final night at a dinner in our honour at the home of Phuntsho and Tenzin. Their living room is also the shrine room, where Phuntsho says her prayers every morning, aspiring to benefit all sentient beings that day. One wall is covered in gold statues of Buddha, Guru Rinpoche and various Buddhist deities. She lights butter lamps, bathing them all in a warm glow.
She presents us with a magnificent handmade rug, from the best carpet weaver in Bhutan, made to her own specifications. It is deep blue, featuring two golden dragons, the symbol of Bhutan, holding a large jewel that represents Buddha’s teachings. Then she hands us a small bundle, wrapped in cotton wool. It is an exquisite brass statue of Tara, the feminine aspect of Buddha. We feel utterly humbled and I kick myself for not bringing gifts. No-one else seems at all concerned.
Phuntsho has managed to source riverweed and wild ferns, both rare delicacies, and prepared them just as her grandmother does, back in the village. We toast the newspaper, Needrup’s editorship and each other.
After sharing their daily worries and aspirations for the newspaper, it feels surreal to say goodbye, to just walk away. We promise to keep in touch by email, aware that we may never see each other again. We share brief hugs at the doorstep, then we are off into the night, feeling sad but also buoyant. The adventure is over, but it was a good one and now home is calling.
The next morning, as the sun is rising, Phuntsho and Tenzin appear out of the mist with hot, sweet tea in a flask and steaming chapattis wrapped in tea towels. They want to share one last meal together before we leave for the airport.
If saying goodbye was difficult, it is nothing compared to re-assimilating into our own culture. For the first few weeks back home in Sydney’s inner west, we are like rabbits in the headlights. Stricken. Mal ventures out to buy food and loses half a day at the local shopping mall, stuck in the muesli aisle, paralysed by choice. He rings to ask what
sort he should get – gluten-free, extra grains, brown grain, with apricot … I tell him I have no idea. I am still sitting in the same spot at home where he left me. I haven’t got past the first page of the newspaper. It is packed with words and pictures and information. I read every photo caption, every advertisement, every single word on the page. I seem to have lost the ability to skim or discern. Brochures yelling at us to buy, buy, buy pour into our letterbox, get pushed under the door and fall out of the newspaper, piling up on surfaces around the house, demanding attention. It is a cacophony and I feel under siege. Kathryn and I unpack a box of belongings and she sits on the floor – surrounded by books, toys and clothes – looking dazed. ‘So much stuff,’ she says, and pushes it away. I know how she feels.
I remember a Melbourne couple, the Claypoles, who in the mid 1990s spent a year in a hut on the ice at Antarctica. When they returned to their four-bedroom home in the Melbourne suburbs, they were unable to unpack the boxes they had so carefully stored. The contents, they said, now seemed irrelevant. I understand how they felt.
Kathryn adjusts quickly, happy to be back with her schoolfriends. They ask her how Bhutan was, she says ‘good’, and that’s the end of it. She seamlessly slips back into their interests. Mal and I take much longer. We do everything we can not to leave the house. Everyone talks too loud, too fast, and stands too close. I have trouble following the pace of conversation. I meet two friends for coffee and cannot keep up as they leap from topic to topic. I feel like the dull country cousin – slow and dense.
I am repulsed by the consumerism that pervades our life in Australia. It is obscene. New-season fashions, new looks for your home, update your car. Whatever for? It all seems so utterly pointless. And shameful. But it is the conversation that dominates our public space. I had never noticed how much the noise of commerce blocks out everything else. I can’t get through a half-hour show on commercial television – the advertisements are an assault on the senses. And the politics is brutal, ugly. Everyone seems so rude.
Gradually we adjust. We rediscover our filters. The billboard posters and bus advertisements start to recede into the background hum. The glossy brochures go straight from the letterbox and the newspaper into the recycling bin, without requiring any attention along the way. I relearn how to read our daily newspaper, skimming and scanning with abandon. People’s conversations start to come into focus and we re-engage with friends, family and what’s happening in this part of the world. It takes a few months but eventually life returns to full warp speed, the pace of modern Australian life.
But there is a part of me that doesn’t catch up – a little corner of my being that cannot share the excitement of having the biggest IKEA in the southern hemisphere open a few suburbs away. I hanker for the slower pace of Bhutan, with its gentler, kinder society, which constantly asks itself, Will this make us happier? Is this benefiting all our community?
Phuntsho puts me on the Bhutan Observer subscription list, and each Friday a PDF of the newspaper arrives in my inbox. It lands midmorning, after I’ve read our own newspaper. Through Needrup’s editorials I can follow what’s worrying Thimphu, 9,400 kilometres away, while keeping up with all Bhutan’s news – from the King granting kidu, to the government helping farmers make friends with pesky elephants that keep trampling their crops in the middle of the night. It’s like a little portal into the parallel universe that is Druk Yul, land of the thunder dragon:
First elephant awareness workshop
by Eshori Gurung
Elephants and humans are in constant conflict in southern Bhutan. To ease this tension and create awareness among the stakeholders, the Nature Conservation Division under Ministry of Agriculture and Forests is organising the first human–elephant co-existence workshop in Lobesa, Wangdue. The workshop started yesterday.
Titled ‘Getting Along with Asian Elephants’, the workshop will focus on educating and training forestry personnel, community leaders and other stakeholders who are directly or indirectly involved in human–elephant related issues.
The participants will be taught how to use educational materials on human–elephant co-existence through exercises, games, dramas and stories. They will be provided elephant etiquette booklets, elephant packet items consisting of friendship band, masks, finger puppets, placards and stickers in both English and Dzongkha …
The stories are a necessary escape and they help to soften our landing. After a while I come to realise that the sweet melancholy I feel is not really for Bhutan as it is, so much as Bhutan the way it wants to be – spiritual, democratic, inclusive and happy, serviced by a media that reflects all that back to its people. It’s an impossible ideal, but that doesn’t matter. I’m happy that somewhere in the world they’ve set the bar so high.
epilogue
A Nation with Many Voices
Bhutan stays with me, and I find my thoughts wandering to that hidden corner of the world where they are doing much the same things as me, just very differently. I read Bhutan Observer’s e-edition each Friday and stay in touch with Phuntsho by email, keeping up with the newspaper’s ongoing struggles. In October 2011 she writes that the situation has become critical. Government advertising has dropped and they have no choice but to sack 28 of the 57 staff and close three of the four rural bureaus. She is devastated. I’m on the last leg of my doctoral thesis on the media in Bhutan and need to update my research, so I persuade my university to fund a return trip and convince my family that they can do without me for three weeks.
I arrive in Thimphu to find a severely diminished Bhutan Observer. Phuntsho has taken over as chief executive officer and Tenzin has moved full-time into another family business. The newspaper has sublet three-quarters of its office space and the remaining 29 staff members are squashed into a couple of rooms. Over tea, biscuits and the clanging sounds of a funeral puja nearby, Phuntsho and Needrup explain the perilous state of the private newspaper industry. Six new newspapers have launched, along with three colour magazines. One magazine is dedicated to Bhutanese film, an industry that is thriving. Another magazine is aimed at women. The third is a news magazine, which published a few editions but hasn’t been seen since. It is a staggering number of publications in a country with few readers.
Phuntsho says a series of foreign consultants have told the government that diversity of the press is crucial for democracy, so small independent players are to be encouraged. As a result, the government has waived their initial requirement that newspapers be published in both Dzongkha and English, and distributed nationally. It seems that anyone with a laptop and an idea can now get a newspaper licence and then a share of government advertising.
‘These foreign experts have no understanding of the ground realities,’ says Phuntsho. She’s not bitter, she explains, just tired. For five years she’s been battling with committees, government departments and just about everybody else to make them understand why good Bhutanese newspapers are needed. Instead, newspapers are increasing in number and declining in quality. It’s a bleak picture.
Facebook, on the other hand, is blossoming into a dynamic forum for public issues. There are pages to debate the contentious tobacco act, as well as campaign for the release of a monk jailed for possessing Nu.120 (A$3.30) worth of tobacco. There are pages to expose corruption, advertise jobs, showcase photography, discuss Thimphu street fashion, promote vegetarianism (its motto – ‘peace, love and spinach’), cheer on their Olympic archery team and swap recipes. The King’s Facebook page is easily the most popular Bhutanese page, with over 100,000 ‘likes’, and following not far behind is that of his new bride, Jetsun Pema.
In many ways Facebook was tailor-made for the Bhutanese. As an oral culture with strong family and village networks, they are used to getting things done via the people they know. The nature of Facebook, creating webs of connections and a chatty, social forum, is a perfect fit. With 55,000 users in Bhutan, it already has six times the readership of Kuensel.<
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During my visit the government switches on its Indian-funded Nu.537 million (A$14.7 million) fibre optic network connecting all 20 dzongkhags (regions) and I get a glimpse into the future. The government has established 100 community cyber centres to bring the internet to people all across the mountainous country. Eventually there will be 185. Each is equipped with at least one desktop computer, printer and photocopier, and will be staffed by a computer-literate Bhutan Post employee. The plan is that in a few years no-one in Bhutan will be more than one day’s walk from a cyber centre. No longer will rural people have to travel to Thimphu to do their banking, pay telephone bills, apply for business licences, seek permits to cut timber, register births and deaths, and more. These community centres will connect them to all the government services as well as to news, blogs, Wikipedia, Facebook, and each other. As rural voices join this new public space, much of Phuntsho’s vision for a place where Bhutanese voices tell Bhutanese stories may yet be realised – just not in her newspaper.
I visit the Opposition leader Tshering Tobgay, who continues to lead the way into this brave new world of digital media. In 2009 his blog, one of the first in the country, averaged around 300 hits a day. Two years later he gets up to 10,000 hits a day. When an earthquake devastated Bhutan, he visited remote villages and posted photos of damaged houses to his 1,000-plus Twitter followers. He is a one-man publishing empire. Dressed in a crisply pleated gho, with a shiny silver MacBook closed on his desk and the latest iPhone by his briefcase, he represents the face of modern Bhutan.
When I ask him about the state of the private newspapers, he says he doesn’t care. He only reads Kuensel, and then only because he feels he has to.
‘Most of the others I skim. I’m not one of these old men who sit back and read every story in a newspaper. It’s not because I am busy. It’s because I’m lazy. I like to lie back on the couch and watch TV … This is what the newspapers have to compete with. This is the reality,’ he says with a laugh.
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