:: One People, Many Cultures ::



::Living Together in Respect and Friendship::

Yesterday was the Damchen, a religious festival before the three day Tsetchu. I’d never been to one before so I joined a few friends and headed down at about 10am. The crowds were much smaller and we easily got a seat in the hot sun. About 10:30, a group of monks dressed in masks and many layers of colourful clothes came out to jump and spin around. There was very little music besides a drum beat and some horns that disipated in the heat before their sound reached us. With the slow motions and lack of music, I had trouble keeping my attention on the show. It was more interesting to talk with the people around. A Bhutanese tour guide told us that the masks were to give our souls the chance to get used to seeing demons so we wouldn’t be frightened when we came across them in the afterlife. The same people stayed out dancing in the heat for over an hour before another group of masked dancers came out. We chose to leave just before lunch.

I might have paid more attention if there was a chance to get a good photo, but cameras aren’t allowed in this festival because of the religious focus.

This afternoon I’m heading into the cool mountains for a 3 day hike. I’ll write again on Tuesday.

I’ve often raved about the driving skills and ethics of Bhutanese, who drive as if they were walking around a village. When driving along the one lane roads, trucks keep to the centre, forcing the little cars with no clearance and less suspension to drive on the road fringes, wheels scraping cliffs or finding air. Yesterday, on our return from Paro, I was humbled and shown the narrowness of my view.

We’d already passed the police border checkpoint but hadn’t reached the roadwork where they were turning the road into a decent two lane highway. Coming around a corner, we saw a truck with its ass in the air. I stopped the car and we rushed over to see if we could add anything to the crowd it had drawn, but everyone was out safely and the owners called to arrange recovery. Before we got back in the car, I took a quick look to see what had happened.

I’m no forensic scientist, but it was pretty clear from the chunk of land missing between the rear wheels that the truck had pulled over to let someone pass. Robin later told me that it had been a speeding taxi. The ground at the top of the cliff had loosened in the rain and given way under the truck’s weight. That weight then pulled the rest of the truck with it. I’m convinced that only the slow drag of the truck, the trees just below the edge and the driver’s quick action to turn the wheels downhill stopped it from being a fatal roll into the river.

Had it been a car, the ground might have held and the car would have stopped once the lower clearance was breached. So I’ll try not to get so angry at ‘thoughtless’ truck drivers in the future.

Robin, Karma’s lead technician has been working at Athang since it started a year ago, but he’s been quite deferential and I haven’t had much of a chance to get to know him. Yesterday, away from Karma’s ears and with me chatting idly, he opened up a bit more. He’s third generation Nepali and hinted at the ‘Southern Bhutanese’ side of the split that happened twenty years ago. I’m not going to write that up here though because there are so many sides to the story and it’s still quite a sensitive topic.

He was also able to enlighten me about some of the aspects of Bhutanese culture that I hadn’t worked out yet. One was as a car approached us and flashed his lights. There was a car parked on the opposite side of the road and only room for one of us to pass at a time. My first thought was that he was telling me to stop and let him go first, but the gap was on my side of the road which should give me right of way, and he was far enough away that I was almost through before he even reached the gap. I asked Robin what those lights meant. ‘They mean stop or get out of my way.’

I fought down ire at the driver who thought that because he was driving a bigger car, he had right of way. Or was it simply that he flashed his lights first that would give him right of way. Either way, I glared at him as we passed harmlessly.

But that didn’t explain why people flash their lights at the soldier directing traffic outside the army barracks on the road to our old house. ‘Do they do that to say thank you to to the soldier?’

‘No. It’s to tell him that they’re going straight ahead.’

It gave me a laugh, but it has a certain Bhutanese logic to it. Blinkers are used more often (and by better drivers) to tell the cars behind that it’s safe (left) or unsafe (right) to overtake than they are to indicate turning. But if blinkers aren’t used much to indicate turning, how is the soldier to know where the approaching cars want to go? Answer, since most of them want to go straight, they can indicate that by flashing their (centre) headlights.

It’s been another one of those days with too much to fit in one entry. Karma is overworked, so he asked me to go to Paro dzong in his stead. They were complaining of viruses and not being able to access the internet. Since the internet was working when it was set up a few months ago, he suspected the problems were related. For me, it was a first because I’d never been allowed into the office areas of the dzong castles as a tourist.

We got an early start and I picked up Robin, Karma’s lead technician and the newest employee, Nadi and made it through the roadworks to arrive in Paro by 9am. We marched past the police checkpoint without stopping to sign in as I’d done every time previously. Then up the ancient wooden stairs on the left to an open, defensive platform. From there, it was a short step down a corridor to the server room, but I was in an entirely different world. Surely they didn’t have hallways with plywood walls when the castle was built 350 years ago!

All the windows were open in the server room, allowing visitors to look out onto the inner cloister unhindered. And that would surely make it the first open air server room I’ve ever come across. After familiarising myself with the network topology, we headed into look at the statistics officer’s PC. It was a natural choice as he used to be the IT guy. Trying to get a new antivirus on his PC and scanning for viruses took a few hours, so I made the time to look around. His room was small, but it was proper compressed mud castle walls, strangely painted yellow.

‘Just think. This room has probably been a monk’s room for the last few hundred years.’
‘Not a monk. A warrior’s I think.’ Wishful thinking, I think, but possible.
‘Either way, how does it feel to work in a room with that much history.’
He thought for a while. ‘The history’s OK. It’s the smell of urine that bothers me.’
Apparently the monks’ toilets are just underneath the offices so the whole area smells, but you get used to it, they tell me.

non-IT people tune out now.
In the end, the biggest problem they had was that half the people in the office seem to have ‘disabled’ their LAN connections in Windows. Another was that a cable had come unplugged and as it was the cross connect between switches, about 10 PCs were affected. And lastly, someone had sold them a few PCs with XP, 1.8GHz processors, but only 128MB of RAM. I haven’t had this much fun since… Actually I’m glad I don’t have that much fun any more.

I don’t have many opportunities to test customer service in the private sector, but the experiences I’ve had have all been frustrating. The first was when my new laptop hard drive crashed. I didn’t know it was the hard drive – it looked more like BIOS and the support staff on the phone agreed with me – so I wanted to send it back in for repair. The local HP shop works with Singapore HP, but I didn’t buy it locally so I called Singapore direct. ‘Just give the main unit to the shop and have them send it to us through their channels. We don’t need power supplies or anything else’ I had a global repair contract, so I wasn’t expecting to have to pay for anything.

The local shop took the laptop along with the ticket number and my purchase receipt and promised to ship it immediately to Singapore. It would be back in two weeks, they said. Two weeks later I got a call to come to the shop. I expected to be picking it up, but when I got there, they said they needed the power supply. They hadn’t sent my laptop. They hadn’t even touched it.

I screamed at them that I needed it urgently and that if they weren’t going to do it, just let me know and I’d do it. They promised it would go immediately. Two weeks later, they called to say that if I wanted them to send it, I’d have to pay the shipping. I screamed at them again for not telling me that in the first place and they promised again to send it immediately. I took the laptop away and did it myself.

I’ve wanted to upgrade it since, but didn’t want to go back to that store. I’d lost my trust in them. But recently the lack of memory has become a problem. I couldn’t open a key powerpoint presentation because it was too large. With Marie going to Europe, I thought she could bring it back with her. The memory was available in the US for $70, but they wouldn’t ship to Europe. After a lot of searching, I found it in Europe for 80 Euro, but it was now a risk that it wouldn’t arrive in time for Marie, so I went back to the local shop.

‘We can get it for you in 10 days at 120 Euro,’ they told me. I decided that the extra cost was better than the small risk of it not arriving in time and the extra month I’d have to use the memory. I asked them to check the delivery time and assure me it was 10 days. They did.

Last Monday, 10 days later, I drop in to pick it up and they’re having a meeting about it. A MEETING about some memory. It seems that it wasn’t in stock and it hasn’t been shipped yet. They decide to try getting from Kolkata and after checking that it’s in stock (why didn’t they do that the first time) they say it will be here in another 5 days – I can pick it up on Sunday.

I went this morning, SURE that it would be here this time, but no. It hasn’t been sent because of rain. A whole week because of rain! It’s still raining, but they assure me it will be here on Thursday. I don’t believe them.

The problem comes from the relaxed nature of Bhutanese. It fits with the friendly, generous nature that makes up happiness. The whole country operates on a ‘it’ll be ready when it’s ready’ policy and until it arrives, there’s no point in worrying about it. Kind of a Buddhist ‘she’ll be right.’ But that’s not going to work in an international environment. My office mate is setting up the technology for a medical transcription service and the King’s sister is setting up the country’s first call centre. If these operate on the same principle, they’ll fail within the first month.

Perhaps they can employ more people for less hours so that the staff can stay happy even with the high stress environment. But I think what’s most needed is some ownership and an understanding of the importance of keeping promises. In both cases, the local HP shop could have made me a happy customer if they’d told me up front what I should expect. I could then have made decisions and set expectations based on accurate information.

I’ve just finished watching Krrish, a bollywood film about a boy with extraordinary abilities who grows up in the mountains where he can’t be exploited. The isolation and his grandmother’s love keep him honest and pure hearted. When he meets the gorgeous Priyanka Chopra, he follows her to Singapore where he dons a mask and saves the world.

Apart from being a great movie, it will find my way into my collection (being Bhutan, this was a pirated version, so I’ll have to find an original when I go travelling) for being the first superhero movie I’ve seen where the hero dances and sings. In fact, Krrish first dons the mask due to a fire that starts in the middle of a love song – in a circus.

My little brother and I have never been close. While I wanted to learn languages, get out in nature and travel the world to see the way people from different cultures live, he wanted to hang around with his white Australia mates at home and smoke pot.

He’s had a pretty tough life – always in debt, losing most of those old friends to drugs or car accidents and never really finding his calling – but he’d probably tell you it was his own fault.

Then last year, he began travelling. He landed in Bangkok, went to Vietnam and Cambodia and by the time he arrived in China, the Brady I knew seemed to have disappeared. He’d developed a huge respect for the people in every country he visited and saw how the culture defines people – that one way isn’t better than another. If anything, he now believes that westerners are a bunch of whingers.

He came to Bhutan after a month in Mongolia and we travelled together through India for a week or so. At that time, he told me that he’d found his life’s goal. He wanted to break down cultural barriers between the people of the world. Our methods are different – he plans to use comedy – but our goals are the same.

I teased him about now being in MY world, but it’s his world now – probably more than mine. I’ve always had a safety net, arriving in each place I live with a ready income and network of potential friends. He arrives with nothing. And after he left me, he went to Pakistan and then onto Afghanistan. He didn’t like everything he experienced (something of an understatement) but that’s normal when you travel and he always had respect for the people he met and the situation they were in.

He risked all and came out with an even stronger respect for nature, life and the people who make this world. I would love to have gone with him, but the timing was wrong and reading his blog, I’m not sure I would have handled it so well. So I missed the experience, but I didn’t lose entirely for now I have a new hero.

I’ve always loved mountains, though as an Australian, I’m easily pleased. Where I come from, 1000m is a mountain. So when I go to a place like Cochabamba in Bolivia and see a mountain at the end of every street, my mood is bouyed. Then I’ll visit a place like Grenoble in France and find that there are snowy mountains in almost every direction and think I’m in wonderland.

But those mountains are always in the distance. Thimphu is right among them. Mountains tower over each other to see what’s happening in town and I get to see them all. Every morning I go outside and decide whether to head up, down or along the lumpy landscape. All day I look up from my PC and see distant trees reaching to the top of the window. And every evening I leave the office and see a temple on a hill at the end of our valley, the dying sun lighting it up while leaving me in shadow. You can’t beat it.

A couple of months ago, while my parents and brother were here, the whole family went shopping at the market. Brady was looking for that useful souvenir that he could still carry on his travels, Mum and Dad were browsing and Marie ended up finding a necklace she liked. It looked African to me, but it was probably Tibetan. It had a big black and white swirl in the centre hanging from black beads. I told her to get if she liked it.

In our own little comic mixup, while we were going back and forth considering the extravagant $10 purchase, Mum secretly bought it, so we ended up with two. But that’s not the point of this story.

As she bought it, Marie looked at me and said that I should feel free to buy something nice when I found it too. The problem is that I haven’t found much that jumps out at me. The only souvenir that I wanted was an antique stamp to make prayer flags and Marie’s parents gave us a beautiful one with coral stones around the border when they left. Otherwise, the things that I want are related to my stereo or PC. Not the sort of things you buy when living in a developing country and are trying to start up a business. Or books, but they’re hard to find.

Then today, on my way back from cycling to BBS Tower, I stopped off to get some rice at Shop No 7 (no idea where the name comes from) and was browsing the isles when I found….. Weetabix! After 7 years in Japan and Belgium, the English breakfast cereal has come to replace what I’ve had since I was eating solids. At $10 a box of 24, I’m not going to have them every day, but I think I’ve found a treat for special occasions.

I pushed myself through writing 8 pages yesterday, when it turns out I should have been down watching the archery contest. While I sat here, I saw the owner of the recently blessed car pulling it all to bits. This car was being vaccuumed, scrubbed and polished to the state it had been before anyone drove it. The guy had even pulled the seats out. I watched to see if he’d do the same to the engine, but was disappointed. What would possess someone to do this every few weeks? I know that Bhutanese work hard to keep their cars clean, but this is ridiculous.

When I realised that I had the wrong day for the archery contest, I rerouted my morning ride into town to see if the judging tents were still up. They weren’t but I saw a lot of people on the roadsides selling balloons and streamers. I can tell you that’s not normal. Pork dumplings, carrots, doma perhaps, but not balloons. And suddenly I remembered…

Where we lived last year, we were far enough above the road that very little of the traffic noise reached us. Until one day in September. Not only did the endless honking of horns reach us, but they were frequently drowned by the raucous screams and whistles of a full blown party. We went down the hill to have a look and found the roads dominated by Indian trucks with trays crammed full of Indian workers acting like grand final day. Decorations covered every bit of the trucks except the wheels and just enough window for the driver to see out of. It was machinery day, an Indian festival to respect the machines that make our lives easier.

So it seems my neighbour was respecting his car and this is an annual rather than a monthly clean.