:: One People, Many Cultures ::



::Living Together in Respect and Friendship::

The weather this year is crazy different to last year. I don’t want to attribute it to global warming. It might just be the standard flux in weather patterns that occur everywhere. Anyway, last year had almost no rainy season and winter was cloudless for its entirety. This year, after an extended rainy season, winter arrived suddenly, but every morning is grey and gloomy. By 9am, the sky has mostly cleared and it’s frightfully cold. It only warms up at noon (and then only in direct sunlight) and is near zero again by 4pm. Some days, the rain returns again in the late afternoon. It could be that we’ll get snow in Thimphu again this year. I say again because it normally snows a few times each year, but I’ve never seen it personally.

Finally! I’ve just heard that the main monk body snuck off to Punakha in the middle of last week. That means that the real winter (as opposed to the government winter) has officially started and I can wear thermal underwear under my gho. Of course, that would look silly if it was too visible, so it has to be tucked into my knee high socks, but it means warmth again.

I’ve been having a small debate on kuzuzangpo.com because at least one member feels that whites should stay in their own country. He seems to ignore the fact that there are far more Bhutanese in Australia than Australians in Bhutan (especially if you look at per capita numbers), but other reasons for a dislike of foreigners include the fact that we come to their country, complain about conditions and laugh at the people. I’m guilty of these things too, as much as I try not to be. I complain about the unreliable water and I laugh at them playing solitaire rather than working. Even if I understand why it’s like this, the Bhutanese don’t know that. They can easily take it personally. Perhaps it’s worse because I understand.

On the other side, I hate having people shout ‘chilip’ at me as I walk down the street. For them, it may just mean foreigner, but its done in the same way as we’d say ‘wog’ in Australia. Here, they may do it with a smile, but that doesn’t change much. I’ve been here for almost two years. I don’t want to be recognised as an outsider any more. The problem is that it’s the easiest way to refer to us. ‘I saw a chilip wearing a gho today.’ ‘You know the chilip at my office..’ So adults use the term and kids hear it. It’s generally the kids that throw it in our faces, not realising that they’re acting in a racist way.

If we can managed to get these terms out of our languages, kids would have less tools to use to hurt each other. Without a word for white person (or pick your colour for other countries) they may even stop thinking there’s a difference. It will be a lot harder to stop talking about differences in culture and conditions, but perhaps we can talk about them with respect so that diversity is always seen as a good thing.

Over the past year and a half, Marie has regularly come home from work, frustrated with stupid management style and government policy. I’ve had to tell her that it isn’t any better in the rest of the world. We all have the same complaints, though I’ve come to realise just how lucky I’ve been with my direct managers.

Some examples of her complaints. To avoid corruption, government departments must go through a strict purchasing process to buy anything – anything at all. The problem is that the vendors then know that it’s the rich government doing the purchasing, so they all mark up their prices by about 20%. I compare this to buying a VoIP headset that I needed urgently for my last job. I could have it the same day from a local store for $20, but I had to go through the proper channels and ended up paying $50 for a lower grade product from a store in the UK that arrived 7 weeks later, by which time I’d bought my own to cover the business need.

She’s also found that her ideas are rejected immediately by the boss, only to have him bring it up himself a few weeks later. This is one I’ve been lucky enough never to have, but I know others who have it all the time. Marie now tells the boss privately, so he can reject it there, because he’ll present the same idea more quickly in team meetings this way.

Now she has a complaint at home. The Institute of Traditonal Medicine Services makes a herbal tea she really likes, but they’ve changed the packaging. Aside from looking less appealing, the tea bag itself is sealed with the external cover, so ripping open the cover also rips open the bag – making tea soup. When she mentioned this to a friend who works at the hospital, he said that they’d just bought a new machine to do the packaging, so they probably wouldn’t revert to the old style now. Where’s the ROI if the machine isn’t used?

Bhutan has only had TV and internet since 1999, but they’ve taken to technology like stray dogs to a meat shop. One prime example is kuzuzangpo.com, a web forum for writers in or about Bhutan. I recently found out that it’s run by a young Bhutanese man studying in Bangkok, and has members throughout Bhutan and possibly the world.

I came to know about this because I’ve been organising a writing group in Thimphu. I find it difficult to get inspired to write when the only feedback I get or give is by email, but kuzuzangpo.com is the only alternative locally. I put the idea out there and got positive feedback, so last night we met at my favourite local restaurant. Only four of us turned up, but one of them drove all the way from Paro for the event. He’d never met one of the others, though they knew each other’s work. The last person was an editor at one of the new newspapers.

Two of them wrote a variety of things, but as Bhutanese tend to only read love poetry, they don’t submit much of their work to kuzuzangpo.com and were excited to have another, more open, forum for sharing their work. And so it became more a group for sharing than discussing, but it’s a start.

Recently, when I’ve walked out of our flat in the evening, there’s been a young girl sitting on the steps outside our door. She lives upstairs, but I guess there’s no room in the attic flats to study, so she brings her notebooks down and sits there to read them.

This morning, Marie and I took a short bike ride up to the Thimphu gaol along a scenic road that passes beneath Semtoka dzong and the Institute of Languages. University aged boys were stationed at 20m intervals along the road, staring at white pages marked with the elegant dzongkha script.

It’s exam time in Bhutan.

What strikes me is the fact that none of these pre-exam students are writing anything. It’s still a rote learning system here and they learn exclusively by memorising by sight. I know there is a lot of concern about the falling levels of students in particular fields, and the government is working hard both to dispell the idea and to improve the curriculum. While I’m sure that it could be improved, especially in the area of making students think, I wonder if the quickest starting point wouldn’t be to encourage students to also listen to and write what they’re trying to learn by rote. At least retention would be improved.

Karma’s friend came with me this morning to see the Regional Transport Officer, which may or may not have helped. The RTO scanned my letter, scribbled dates on the page, checked his calculator, reminded me that I now owed 16,200 Nu, which included one month free and then offered a reduced fee of 4500. It was still 50% more than we thought fair, but it was obvious this wasn’t negotiable, so I took it. Add to that 2000 Nu for registration, which has gone up, apparently, and we owed 6500. I checked the wad of money I’d brought and found 6440 Nu. Nothing for it but to make another trip home (I went three times yesterday trying to get all the right people and papers together) and finally it was all sorted out.

But not for me. I wanted to get a copy of the road rules to check if I was right in thinking that international rules should apply. The best place to start seemed to be the counter for learner’s licences. Behind the glass screen, the girl in charge looked at me blankly. ‘What licence do you have?’ I tried to explain that I had a valid licence, but I wanted to know the rules, ‘like who has right of way at an intersection.’ She made me show her my Bhutanese licence and told me that was fine. When I pushed harder, she went off to talk to a superior.

A young man beside me, obviously applying for his learner’s licence showed me pages of road signs in his driving permit, saying that it was effectively the road rules. I looked at signs with labels like ‘no right turn’ and ’roundabout’ and realised that I hadn’t seen a single one in the country. I asked him if it described who has right of way at the roundabout and he said it depended on the policeman.

The girl came back and took me up to see the mechanical engineer who was in a meeting. I have to go back another time to see what the relationship is between a mechanical engineer and road rules.

We leant our car to Sam, a visiting FAO consultant, for the weekend and he was stopped by police. They probably recognised that he wasn’t the usual driver, because even at the official checks, they wave me through and only ever ask Marie for her license – probably just so they can talk to her for a minute.

This time, they actually asked him whose car it was and he told them. But we never transferred ownership officially so the registration is in the name of a local monk. The police probably had a good laugh asking Sam if this monk was one of his expat friends. It might have stopped there, but flicking through the blue book, they realised that registration had expired in May.

I had to go to the Roads Safety & Transport Authority yesterday to get the registration renewed. There was a sign saying that the late fee was 50 Nu per day, which comes to a lot, so I was sent in to the RTO. I told him that I’d done the fitness check and the emissions test, got insurance but no one had told me that I needed to renew the registration. He seemed to take this for a good opportunity and told me that it was 100 Nu per day, coming to a total of 15,900 Nu. The annual registration fee is only 1500 Nu.

This isn’t a fine. It’s a ransom. But I held my tongue until he told me to write a letter explaining the situation and they’d think about it. And every day, the fee goes up.

It started out as a bike ride to Chelela, one of the highest passes on the road and to our west. It ended up as a ride down to Tsirang in the south of Bhutan. Carolyn, a fellow Aussie is dating a bloke called Kinzang who was posted there a year ago. Now he lives with Ugyen, the brother of my office mate and the policeman in charge of the Tsirang checkpost. They’re both friends with Pemba, the son of the family we used to live under, who is managing part of a big power project down there.

Marie had been trying to pull out of the trip since I suggested going with Michelle, another Aussie, to see the gang. Her excuse was the amount of work she has to do and the stress that’s causing her. All the more reason to get out in the fresh air and exercise for a couple of days, I said. Even that sounded pretty lame when we woke to rain yesterday morning. Somehow, I managed to drag her along.

Due to the distance (known only from the long straight line on the map in the front of the Lonely Planet), we put the three bikes in a taxi and were driven over Dochula to the Wangdue checkpost on the tropical side of the pass. The road was generally downhill, much fewer bends than usual, and through beautiful scenery with aqua rivers at the base of lush green mountains. Some hillsides so steep that tree branches seemed to dig into the soil in an effort to stop the tree from falling over. And then there was the drizzle, but that didn’t really bother us.

We made the Tsirang checkpost by 2:40 and chatted with the police for a while. One of them asked the usual question, ‘where’s your guide.’ I gave my usual response, ‘I’m the guide,’ which got the usual laughter. Marie took it to the next level, by telling them that I was from Lunana, a village at about 5000m and 3-4 days walk from the nearest road. ‘You’ve never been to Lunana, have you. They all have blue eyes and blonde hair because of the altitude.’ This was good enough to be translated into Dzongkha and passed around the whole station. I’m sure it was repeated to the next 20 travellers that passed through.

Carolyn was meant to meet us at the checkpoint but we decided to push on up the hill to Damphu which sounded like a 3 hour ride. We met Carolyn coming the other way in her little Alto before the climb really started and Michelle put her bike in for a luxury arrival. This was meant to be our weekend together, so I pushed on to find Marie. By the time I caught her (only because she was waiting for me) the now torrential rain had soaked us through and showed no sign of abating.

No problem. We had a hotel room booked and it could only be another 2 hours to the top.

2 hours later, there was no blood flow to my legs and Marie was stopping more often to let me catch up. Just when I was about to fail even in granny gear, Carolyn and Kinzang turned up in his work truck and helped me throw it in the back. There were still 15 steep km to go. Marie wouldn’t join me. ‘I said I was going to the top, so I’m going.’ I knew that if I stopped her, she’d insist on doing the return trip the next day and I was just as sure that my arse couldn’t take another day on the old fashioned bike seat.

Kinzang leant me some spare clothes and the hotel promised to send up a bucket of hot water to bathe in, since the taps in the room weren’t running. That also meant that the squat toilet was full of shit that couldn’t be flushed. When the water arrived after half an hour of shivering, it was too hot to even put a finger in, so I had to wait for it to cool.

Marie arrived before that happened, shaking from her fear of getting lost in the misty darkness and the dogs that followed her, but triumphant at having completed her goal. We got a bucket of cold water and scooped a mix of both buckets over us to warm up. It was a relief to be in our clothes borrowed from our hosts and into their living room, sipping whisky and chatting. Ugyen had claimed some of the chicken newly imported and made us a delicious dinner of chicken curry, ema datshi, rice and dahl.

His house is decorated with pictures of the royal family and him in his finest police dress – receiving a medal on behalf of all militia a couple of years before, in one. Kinzang doesn’t appear anywhere, but Ugyen showed us a patch of wall he’d left for anything Kinzang cared to put up. Conversation carried us through until 10pm when 3 exhausted chilips asked to be taken back to the hotel.

This morning dawned clear and beautiful. Michelle got up in time to see the distant snowy peaks glowing red in the dawn light. We missed that by minutes, but caught the sun settling onto the King’s guest house and the weekend market being laid out. Pemba picked us up and took us to his house for breakfast where he told us how much he liked working for his dad, how he was saving up to buy cars for his sisters and how happy he was that his younger sister was able to sleep until noon and enjoy partying with her friends because of the good work he was doing there. And he meant it.

Despite the weather, we took a taxi all the way back to Thimphu, stopping to take pictures of the scenery that had been washed out the day before and to chat to the police at the checkpoints. Dochula was in a rare gay mood, shedding its mist to reveal an expanse of tall snow capped mountains. A fitting end to a great weekend.

After so long that I can’t count the months, perhaps 8, we have chicken again. Most of the chicken in Bhutan is imported from India. That includes the day old chicks that are grown for laying eggs. As soon as there were confirmed cases of bird flu in India, Marie’s department closed the border for imports. It only took a couple of weeks for chicken and eggs to disappear from the shelves. What little was being produced within Bhutan was going to the royal palace.

Eggs reappeared a month or so later and I assume that the king, in his usual humble way, decided that he shouldn’t be depriving his people. But the price jumped from 6 Nu to 15 Nu per egg and you had to fight for them.

Then a few months ago, some of Marie’s managers went to India to negotiate new a new import agreement. Now there are strict controls on where the chickens may come from and under what conditions. The egg situation will take time to change, but now we get supermarket style chicken in the shops rather than having to gut it ourselves. And I had chicken curry with my lunch yesterday. Yum!