:: One People, Many Cultures ::



::Living Together in Respect and Friendship::

A couple of days ago, I was accosted by a young man on the street. It took a moment to recognise him, but his grunted gesture at my gho followed by a big smile and thumbs up as he moved past identified him as a man I met on my return from India.

I was walking back from the bus station, a large rucksack weighing me down and depression clear in my steps. Suddenly the young man – more of a boy, really – was beside me, grinning, gesturing that I should run. He jogged ahead a bit then turned to see me shaking my head. Not in the mood. Too tired. He jogged back, grabbed my arm and pulled me along, laughing. I couldn’t help but join the laughter as he dragged me up the street until even keeping my feet from tripping me was too much effort and I put on the brakes.

He turned again, smiling, gesturing and grunting and I realised he was deaf. Or playing deaf. These beggers carrying ‘official’ papers to proclaim their defects and request assistance have begun to turn up in Bhutan now. Begging is illegal here, so any papers they have can’t be official. My smile faded and I prepared myself to tell him that I didn’t believe him. I certainly wouldn’t give him any money. He lifted his arm as if pretending to screw in a light bulb. Where are you going? ‘Home,’ I told him. I live here. I’m not a gullible tourist with lots of money to throw away. His response was to give me the thumbs up, run on the spot, then, still grinning, take off across the street.

I hate it when my western suspicion drives my prejudices. This young man was the embodiment of Gross National Happiness. He was genuinely disabled, but wasn’t going to let that get in the way of enjoying life. He gets my vote for Chief Happiness Minister.

Yesterday was a great day for cultural experiences. One of the topics that came up when talking to my friend at DIT was call centres. Bhutan sees the money made in India from outsourcing call centres for developed countries and wants to join the game. Naturally DIT is involved and the big one they’re working on now is financed by the king’s sister. I offered my help for the chance to meet a member of the beloved royal family, but also because I know she’s paying well and I believe that my services can help her staff in working with their customers. I’m not going in directly with that idea, though. The services I offered are more on the design side, having designed, implemented and technically managed 4 call centres in my career.

Sangay asked me if I thought his staff would be able to manage the technology and I assured him they could. In my opinion, the technology is the easiest factor and his team are all quite capable. The big challenge, I told him, would be in finding someone capable of managing the staff. It’s a huge job to train and monitor each call centre agent and keep their morale high while working in a demanding environment.

That lead to a question on what I thought would be important qualities in the actual agents. I gave what I’m sure were standard answers. Technical competence would be ideal, but the lack could be overcome in many cases with well designed flow charts and clean escalation channels. No. The most important issue would be accent. No one in Australia calling a bank or to complain about a faulty product wants to know that they’re talking to someone in India. ‘How can they understand my situation,’ we think.

Sangay thought this over and said, ‘I think they shouldn’t hire people like me that chew lots of doma.’ I looked at the red stained teeth he had from chewing beetlenut and failed to see how that would be an issue on the phone – as long as they didn’t chew it during a call. ‘Doma makes your tongue thick so no one will understand us.’

I know I just posted a few minutes ago, but this is one of those days when interesting things happen repeatedly. On my way home, I decided to stop in at DIT to see my old friend the Associate Director. I’d helped him last year on the IT Showcase for the National Assembly and he found me the teaching position at RIM. Today he was excited about their biggest project to put a VSAT connection into Lhuntse, a small area out east.

Bhutan Telecom had plans to give them ten phone lines, but with 300-400 residences, that wasn’t going to help much. So DIT put in the satellite connection and a small phone system. The result is that phones are scattered throughout the sprawling village and local calls can be made at a cost of 1 Nu with no restriction on duration.

The story that really brought a smile to his face was of the two engineers he’d sent up installing a phone in the house of an elderly man. While they were working, the man came down sick with something that appeared lethal. They asked where his family were and he said that they were all away visiting others. It turned out that his wife was visiting a house they’d just been to, only a couple of hours walk away. They had the number and gave her a call. She brought help and together with the engineers, they carried the man to the BHU (basic health unit) where he was treated and lives to tell the tale.

Putting internet access in the school will be a small victory after that story.

I haven’t had much formal experience in interviewing people and no experience on the other side of the table in more than ten years, but today I found myself giving advice to job applicants. Karma, my office mate has advertised two positions in his rapidly growing business and I’ve been the only one around when most of the candidates come in. I’m surprised at the number that have asked to see previous applications. I’ll have to ask Karma if that’s normal practice in Bhutan.

The next surprise is the questions I got. ‘It says “Women are encouraged to apply.” Does that mean that preference is given to women?’ ‘It says “Email submissions are accepted.” Do we need to send an email as well?’ You could put that down to language problems, but these applicants have completed twelve years of schooling given in English. Nerves, perhaps.

Then there are the people who want to apply without having read the job description and those that say they’ve read it, hand over their application, then on the way out ask what the job description actually means. Many can’t even be bothered paying 2 Nu per page to have their application printed on fresh paper, choosing instead to use the backside of scrap paper.

Finally, most of them ask how many people have applied before them and look dejected when I tell them. Then come the questions that would be asked of an interview coach. I have to tell them that all the applicants will have the academic requirements, or will pretend to, and they have to distinguish themselves by demonstrating that they have a genuine, and preferably long standing, interest in the job area. What a novel idea.

The biggest shock came when one of these applicants, after hearing my suggestions, decided he needed to update his cover letter. He took the application off Karma’s desk, grabbed a chair and sat down at the nearest clear flat space, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he’d just commandeered my desk. There’s a career limiting move if ever I’ve seen one.

I’ve spent the last few days comatose and the nights watching an industry webcast from the US. There hasn’t been much time for culture, or for action at all, but I have started reading the introductory book on Bhuddism. The first few chapters were a disappointment. They were about the life of Bhudda, but rather than being a realistic story of how he gave up his princehood for poverty and then realised that the middle path was best, it reads like a Hindu myth. The Great Being that was also the Future Bhudda decided it was time for the world to experience his presence again and looked for the most pure family in a high cast to be born into. He then went around the world allowing everyone to bask in his glory, including the gods of all 10,000 worlds. The ultimate arrogance is that he performed his morning ablutions not out of necessity, but so that his body servant would have the pleasure of serving him. The only useful point I took out of the whole introduction was that Bhudda’s purpose was to end misery in the 10,000 worlds.

The first teaching of Bhudda in the book is that there is no ego. At first reading, this makes sense. It talks about how we are more than the sum of our parts. A deeper reading says clearly that our senses are a product of our being and since there is no such thing as our being in a technical sense, there is no such thing as sensation. Pleasure and pain in all their forms are merely a product of our imagination and can safely be ignored. My interpretation of this, when combined with the overall objective mentioned in the earlier chapters, is that misery can be ignored, but at the cost of ignoring pleasure as well. That’s all very philosophical, but it strikes me as rather negative. Rather than eliminating misery by saying ‘let’s address the cause of misery’ or ‘let’s learn to be happy’, Bhuddism seems to say ‘let’s learn to ignore misery’.

Perhaps Christianity isn’t as backward as I’d thought.

Marie just called me. I was lying in bed resting in preparation for an all night webcast seminar, so I was ready for the bad news. Anna, her predecessor, is coming back to Bhutan in a high paying consultant role. It’s not that we don’t like Anna. We all got on very well while she was here in the first week. On the contrary, it’s because Anna is such a well-known and respected person in the agriculture community in Bhutan. After a year and a half, Marie is only just getting respect in her own right rather than being compared to Anna.

Everyone seemed to forget that Anna had been in Bhutan for 4 years, was familiar with the culture, had developed relationships through the entire community and acted like a Bhutanese herself. It was never fair to compare her with Marie who had just arrived in the country with nothing but her knowledge of agriculture and economics. Nothing she did could ever compare to the wonderful Anna. Now that will probably start again.

Marie’s back. I should’ve mentioned that before, but I was on a roll of cultural diatribes. She got back on Saturday night and we’ve had a bit of time to catch up. It was her first time managing a team and she loved it. Despite the ‘Spider Solataire’ culture of Bhutan, she managed to keep them working seven days a week for the full month, with only a couple of recovery days. The only time she had trouble was in Mirek – Sakten, the villages she’d been most looking forward to visiting. It’s almost impossible for most of us to get a road permit to reach these places, but she had government support which opens many doors.

The problem was a culture clash with the extension agent on work ethics. In Marie’s eyes, he pushed the image of lazy beyond the acceptable bounds. His attitude is not really surprising considering he probably thought he’d be getting an easy government job in a major town rather than 2 days walk from the nearest road. When Marie arrived in the evening, she wanted to meet to plan the next couple of days. The extension agent (a general purpose consultant and govt. go between for farmers) was playing darts and didn’t think it important enough to quit for.

The next day, although Marie had asked to meet the farmers on their own farms – so she could have a look at the setup herself – he arranged for them all to meet in the village, 2 hours later than she’d been planning. On the following day, she asked him to take her to the dairy processing unit at 7am so she could see the making of cheese / butter, but he turned up at 9am, after it had all finished. Finally, he decided to walk them back to the road, probably to get a daily service allowance, and tried to extend their trip by a day for the extra money he’d get.

The real shock for Marie was the reaction of her team – not to the extension agent, but to Marie herself. Anger is not appropriate, so when Marie stopped being friendly to him, her team stopped talking to Marie. They’d been coaching her to give some money – a tip, I guess – to each extension agent who merely did their job, and she’d complied until this time. As she wouldn’t give him any money, her team did, complaining that they’d had to give from their own pockets. By that stage, Marie cared little and the team showed typical Bhutanese friendliness, forgiving her quickly.

The sound of a siren dug its way into my work trance today. Actually, it didn’t take much. A siren is such a rare sound here. I think this was the first ever in my entire time in Bhutan. I ran to the window, trying to work out whether it was a police car / ambulance / fire engine or a car alarm or shop or something entirely new, but I saw nothing to give it away.

Traffic noise is nothing new. The Bhutanese subscribe to the Indian school of ‘honk for any occasion’, but here it has meaning. The traffic isn’t so dense that the sound is lost amongst the horn jungle and people are absent minded enough to need it. Honking here is like the sound of bird calls at dawn. They say, ‘I’m here. Who else is around? Are you OK?’ I wish I could get into the habit. As I drive down the road – main street, highway, quiet mountain road – parked cars pull out in front of me with no warning. Why should they bother looking to see if anyone’s there? I would have honked if I had been.

Unfortunately, I have a hard time giving up my western school of ‘honk to tell someone how pissed off you are’ and I’d only hit the button if I was ready for a fight. Even worse, when others honk as they come up behind me on my bike, it puts me in the mood for a fight. Then I need to unclench my jaw and think of Bhudda.

I’ve had enough. I don’t want to code any more. I’ve gotten to the point where I know that I can do almost anything, but I just can’t be bothered. I want to work on my books. I want to spend my evenings reading. I want to get out and be in Bhutan more. I’ve therefore decided to move all my web site onto standard software. This new blog template is the first step. It took a little work to get the title picture set up, but that wasn’t so boring as coding has become.

I’m also delighted that RIM isn’t expecting me to teach this year. Working with the students was fun on occasion, but since they have no real interest in the subject and I’m not empowered to change things, I lost interest a long time ago. I thought they liked me, at least, but last week I saw a few of the girls on the street and as soon as they saw me, they turned and walked away. If a returning student is a teacher’s biggest pleasure, hostile students has to be the biggest depressant. There is a chance that they’ll organise a special week-long course some time this year, and could ask for my help, but that would be much more interesting for me. And I’ll keep working on the inventory system, but in my own time.

After a 5am ride up to Dochu La this morning, I was energised for a day of religion. OK. There’s very little connection there, but I did feel like heading into a bookstore for a look at some books on Bhuddism. I chose a couple of titles to help me overcome guilt at having lived in Bhutan for almost 18 months and still having little idea what it’s all about. The first book is called ‘The Wisdom of Bhudda’ which seems to be a basic grounding in who the Bhudda was and the ideas he presents as the path to enlightenment. I’ll need this to be ready for the next step.

The second book is called ‘Ritual and Devotion in Bhuddism’ and is the main cultural reason I’m interested. The main discussion point I got shushed for the other night was on Bhuddism. David, a volunteer on a tourist length assignment, asked us if any of us felt we were becoming more Bhuddist because of our time here and I claimed the opposite. Before I arrived, I respected Bhuddism as being the least religious of all religions. I thought it was more of a philosophy than a religion and that intrigued me. But in Bhutan it seems to be a set of superstitions. Old people spend their day chanting and spinning prayer wheels. The population, whether they believe it or not, are bound by the astrological predictions of the monk body. And every few weeks someone in the neighbourhood has a puja ceremony to purify the land, the house or the year.

I’m told that all these rituals have a deeper significance than I can see with my western mind, just as I misinterpret Bhuddists when they speak of the gods. Perhaps this book will help me bridge that gap.