Final-ish words

I've actually left Damak at this point. One of the refugee drivers who works for Caritas drove me to the airport in Biratnagar (industrial city with soap and brick factories). He told me that he may join his family in Michigan or may join the part of his family who is in Maryland. He's not sure. Like other refugees, he was very familiar with the different states in America, though a little puzzled by why they are so different from each other.

I have been traveling a bit around Nepal (in and around Kathmandu and Pokhara) for the last week or so. I've missed my new friends, but it's been good to use the Nepali they taught me and to take in the amazing natural beauty, architecture and food in other parts of the country. It's also been great to read about the history of the country (Forgetting Kathmandu: an Elegy for Democracy by Manjushree Thapa) and get a better understanding of the historical relationships between the royal family, the Congress Party, and the Maoists that have affected the politics I learned about in the camps.

When I get back to the US, I look forward to publishing the information for teachers here on this blog and of course in other locations. I am also looking to get it translated in Nepali once I get a final version. I also have many photos I've been unable to upload at this point, and will use this to link to those as well.

Thank you for reading and I was so happy to see that Jennifer posted a link to a website in the comments section in an old post. I'd like to encourage those interested in reading further to consult these sites.

Human Rights Watch. “Last Hope: The Need for Durable Solutions for Bhutanese Refugees in Nepal and India.” Available at http://www.hrw.org/en/node/10953/section/4

About 24 sources are listed under Bridging Refugee Youth and Children’s Services websites Highlighted Resources for Bhutanese. Available at http://www.brycs.org/highlighted-resources.cfm?refugeepopulations&list=36

Late Fragment

I stole this title from one of my favorite Raymond Carver poems. It reads:

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

I thought of this poem often as I wrapped up my short month here. Although Carver wrote this towards the end of his life, and I'd always read the last two lines as speaking to a personal, rather than universal feeling of being beloved, lately I've been considering the last two lines in a more universal sense. I've been thinking of this idea of seeking a sense of belovedness both from within and from those around us as it relates the work I've been up to here. I've had a couple projects/activities going: spending days with 8th graders in classrooms, and lately, since they've been in testing, doing some teaching in the adult ESL program they call Spoken English. I've also been writing and revising a teacher guide.

(And, as an aside, I've continued to enjoy Bananagram nights with the Sisters. Sister Lourdes's new favorite variation, which she plays after we are all done playing and have left, is to dump out all the tiles, create as many compound words as she can, link them, and then see if she can manage to use all the tiles. She's completely addicted. I may need to suggest a 12 step program.)

It's the teacher guide that I think about when I think of these lines. The purpose of this teacher guide is to give teachers in the US background information on the Bhutanese refugee community and the schools here. This community is unique among other immigrant and/or refugee communities, as far as I know, because they've experienced a single school system, and so this kind of guide is possible. I will be sending out this teacher guide through various paths when I return back to the US in a few weeks. I'll also publish it on the blog.

Before I continue, I want to acknowledge that this is a very grand statement for me to make, that I've written a guide that faithfully describes, even in a limited way, the experience of Bhutanese refugees and their school system. It has taken me six or so drafts with revisions from teachers, counselors, and administrators. I've had drafts greeted, and understandably so, by grumbles of "Well, if you come in for one month you have a very limited knowledge," which has led to meetings of several hours, with sentence-by-sentence revisions made with people who have been here for twenty years. In my final meeting, when I was finalizing the historical background section, I sat across from one of the men who had established the schools in the 1990s. I felt quite nervous as I looked him in the eye and recited from memory the history of the community's journey from Bhutan to Nepal and the establishment of the schools, as I had heard and understood it. I felt relieved when he mostly nodded, and jumped in to clarify details I was missing and show me where I needed to add context. At this point, I hope my description reflects the view and experience of a teacher who has been here for a month, one who has also had the benefit of getting revision help from people who know better than I do.

My hope is that if teachers read this guide they will feel a deeper sense of connection to these students, the kind that is possible when you have a better understanding of where your students are from and the schools they studied in before they came to the US. I am hoping that if Bhutanese students know that their teachers know more about why they are here and where they come from, they can feel a stronger sense of belonging here. How does this relate to Raymond Carver? It seems to me that feeling understood is the first step to feeling a sense of belonging, and that you must first feel that you belong before you can feel that more sought-after experience of feeling beloved.

Clearly, the students here, like people everywhere, crave a sense of belonging. For example, when the students asked me if they could stop being refugees when they come to the US, I thought of it as a procedural question. I spoke to them of having a year before applying for permanent residency, and then five years for citizenship application. They listened and then asked again, if they would still be refugees. I explained that if they had US citizenship, then they'd be citizens. Some of them smiled. We don't have to be refugees forever? one asked again. What is this question about, if not belonging?

Of course, that sense of belonging will come not just from schools, but from all parts of life. And, I hope that once that sense of belonging comes, that it will be possible, in the future, to feel beloved in the communities they find and make for themselves. That may seem like a strange thing to write, but look at the fears behind the rumors that come up in the pre-migration IOM cultural trainings.

If people with disabilities and elderly cannot work they will be given injection for death or they will be thrown on the ocean.

If some one passes away, we cannot cremate just one dead body, but need to wait for many days so that there are more dead bodies collected to be cremated in a group.

Black people will take away unmarried daughters even if they are walking on the street during the day time.

African-Americans slap Bhutanese for no reason.

It might be okay to look at a white person in the eye, but if you look at a black guy in the eye, he won't like it and will probably beat you up.

Husbands and wives cannot see or meet each other.

In the picture painted by these fears, the US is a place where black people seek to harm you, husbands and wives are split, cremation rites must be observed differently, and the elderly and infirm are put to death. All of these fears speak to, among many other things, a sense of not belonging in the US.

One of the Sisters told me a story that helped me understand this in yet another way. She was working at a college in India where there were a group of Bhutanese refugees studying. She suggested to a group of the young Bhutanese refugee women there that they "be more like the Tibetans." The Tibetans organized cultural and educational programs. They informed people about their cause, and shared their culture. What a model for refugees everywhere! Later, another teacher told the Sister that her words had made the young women cry. The Sister was baffled and went to speak with the students and explained that it wasn't her intention to make them upset. She also wanted to know why her words had been so upsetting. The Bhutanese students explained that they hadn't wanted the students from Nepal at the college to know that they were Bhutanese refugees, because then they might look down on them. The Bhutanese had been "passing" as Nepalis. The Sister had outed them in a way they hadn't wanted to be outed.

I state the obvious when I write that feelings of belonging and belovedness take time, and perhaps it is too much to ask for, to seek to feel beloved in a new country. Many groups in the US certainly don't feel beloved here, or feel that they are loved in a very conditional way. Yet it still strikes me as a worthy thing to strive for, to create an environment that invites each of us to call ourselves beloved, and feel ourselves beloved on the earth.

School Prayer and Beyond

On Friday morning I was headed to one of the far eastern camps with brother Paul and three Bhutanese refugees who help at Caritas. One is Christian, one is Hindu, and one is Buddhist. (There are even more religions practiced in the camp, at least seven kinds of Christians, and including one religion I'd never heard of. I've come to understand that this is a vastly more diverse group of people than I'd known before coming here.)

So, I was curious to know whether or not there was any conflict about the fact that all school children recite a Hindu prayer in the morning before classes. Apparently here there's no fight over who gets the morning prayer, and they were mystified as to why anyone would care. I explained that people in America sometimes argued about this issue. As I was explaining, it struck me that when you have no state then maybe nobody worries about the separation of church and state.

Everyone thinks about the state and marriage, though, and the subject of our conversation moved from one aspect of culture to another: the divorce rate in the US. This turns into a conversation where my end goes something like, "Yes, some people have open marriages but it's not really a widely-accepted practice." Apparently some American guy who worked in Damak had a live-in girlfriend here and a wife at home, confirming what everyone already knew to be true about marriage in America. Thankfully it was Paul who brought up the fact that polygamy is practiced in the Bhutanese refugee community here, whereas it's illegal in the US. (Interestingly, resettlement policy has been sensitive to this issue, prioritizing children's access to the father. Bhutanese people have praised the UN to me for the way this is handled. Bhutanese husbands will divorce the second wife before resettlement, and then the understanding is that the second wife and children are then resettled near the father and the first wife, so the father can see both children.) While polygamy was practiced in Bhutan (the king has more than one wife), some speak of how the move to the camps has transformed the family. The new developments are multiple divorces, remarriage and blended families, and most recently, young people eloping out of fear that they'll get resettled in different places and never see each other again.

In the adult ESL class, the issue of family practice and resettlement has come up because of the fear that moving to the US will mean an end to certain important religious practices. "My father doesn't want us to resettle because he says that if we go to the US then after he dies we won't be able to honor his death," one woman began. She wondered out loud if she could take off work in order to maintain their religious practice of being silent for thirteen days and only eating once a day. Another woman asked me how she could be happy in the US. I told her that I was the last person who could tell her about her happiness, although I was more than willing to answer questions about American English.

Whle I've enjoyed being with the adult ESL classes, mostly women who know they will be resettling, I can also feel their anxiety. Their questions are laced with it.

What will we do when the money finishes if we don't have a job?

Can we come back?

What if we get sick?

What if I am mostly blind? Can I still get a job?

Will black people dominate us? (To use the exact words.)

At times like this, I am reminded of a conversation I had with one refugee. "A political crisis turned into a humanitarian crisis," he said, speaking of the situation in Bhutan, and then the situation when the community first arrived in Nepal. "And now this resettlement..." he said, shaking his head at the strangeness of the turn it has taken where his community is now, as a result of a problem in Bhutan, being scattered across the Netherlands, the UK, Australia, the US, and a few other countries. (To be fair, ten to twenty thousand may be in India as well, but that is another story.) "How do we avoid being stuck in the cycle of poverty?" he asked me.

While this artificial support system in the camps has given twenty years of shelter, education, food rations, and access to a doctor, it has also created a situation where a group of thousands of people have not been legally allowed to work (although some have found ways around this) and support themselves. Taking the first steps outside of this artificial world are terrifying to these women, and others here, as they would be to me if I were in their situation. I suppose it's unsurprising that school prayer doesn't make it on the list.

Get thee to a Nunnery

Technically, I do not live in a nunnery. There's a wealthy family who lives on the first floor and owns several farms in the area. Some members are abroad, but the grandmother, who is about four feet and has enormous gold jewelry in her nose, is the matriarch of the place. Her son, who is a dwarf, also lives there, with his beautiful wife who washes clothes, and their two small children. A teenage boy also lives there and appears to be part of the family. The woman who cleans for them also cooks and cleans for us, and we all eat well. (Having a cook might seem to contradict the vow of poverty but it is a huge help given the fact that everyone is working all the time.)

We smile and say hello, but the dwarf didn't speak to me until yesterday. When I got home from work, there were tarps laid out with meat on them Someone was sawing.

"I killed buffalo," he explained, smiling. I had heard that the buffalo, who had been tied in the backyard the past few days, was going to meet its end soon, and apparently yesterday was the day. There was not much of the buffalo left there that night.

Anyway, we are on the second and third floors, and mostly I only feel like I'm in a nunnery in the morning. They have their morning prayer, attended by brother Peter, Paul, and father Amal, from 6:30 to 7, so I tiptoe by the prayer room, which is covered by a cloth curtain, on my way to the shower and back. The shower is at the end of the hall. They promised me that they don't hear me but I still feel a little awkward about it.

It is interesting to live with people who spend a lot of time praying, because it's novel to me. When I'm coming back from my run (think flat roads surrounded by rice paddies, with an ocassional boy on a bicycle from the refugee camps telling me he's moving to Washington) in the morning, I can hear their singing from the road outside. I don't yet know what kind of influence they've had on me, but I do know that I've gotten two of them completely hooked on banannagrams.

Usually the sisters play cards after dinner, but one night this week they were short a sister and I decided it was a good time to introduce the game. They like Scrabble, and bannagrams is basically a cousin as far as games lineage goes. (I apologize in advance to those readers who are not familiar with the game banannagrams, but this will be a good opportunity to learn.)

The Sisters agreed to play, and we put down the tiles. Sister Anacleta spread them out, making sure they were well-mixed, and then when we chose our eleven tiles, she improbably picked almost entirely vowels. This did not phase Sister Anacleta. I'm not sure exactly how this goes, but I believe Father Amal had requested Sister Anacleta to come work here. He had met her back in 1970, when a cyclone hit Andrapradesh. It had been Father's job to help collect the bodies, which he described the first night I met him in horrifying detail. Then they'd had a major de-salinization effort as part of the clean up, so that the land would be farmable again. Sister Anacleta came to audit the process, checking records to see if the diesel had been used for the de-salinization or sold on the side. She's impressive and exactly the person you'd want for such a job: compassionate and unfailingly logical.

Anyway, the game began and I had gotten good letters, so I finished quickly. The sisters took some time getting used to strategy, and I took some time getting used to their term "zed" for "z" when they said things like, "Buzz has two zeds?" Sister Lioba often didn't take an extra tile when someone called peel. I took a tile for her, and she smiled at me. Sister Lioba has a warm smile and she and I have sat for hours at the kitchen table, having tea while the monsoon rains dumped water outside, and she told me stories about teaching Chemistry, and her large family back in Kerala.

I noticed that Sister Lourdes liked to take more time and create words that pleased her. When she managed "love" and "you" together with a common "o", she showed them to me. I admired them, and then reminded her that there were no extra points for these sorts of things. She was also in the habit of turning over tiles to choose a letter she liked when someone said peel. I called her out on cheating, and she smiled at me and insisted she needed certain letters.

Sister Lourdes and I ususally watch the sunsets on the terrace together when it's not raining. She does a walking meditation up there, and then she will come and sit with me. One of my favorite parts of the day is when we watch the sky fall into darkness around us while we talk about anything from the long boat trip she had to take all the way around Africa in the 1960s when the Suez Canal was closed and she had to get back to India from England, or the time she worked in Orissa, or my school, or Victor Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning which she and I both love, or about the years when she was the head of a school of social work.

Sister Anacleta joins us sometimes. One day Sister Anacleta brought peanuts, and told me how her family used to grow them on her farm. They grew the kind that had two nuts, since there was more oil in them. They'd grown different things at different times: cotton, red gram, chiles, sorghum. Sister Anacleta lived in the Netherlands for a time, and she talks about that too.

Anyway, I digress. For our first game, Sister Lourdes was the last to finish, her "q" tile set apart from the others.

"Looks like you're having avoidance issues with that "q"" I told her.

"But I have no "u"!" she protested.

"Excuses, excuses," I told her, and Sister Anacleta laughed.

"Excuses, excuses," she repeated, smiling. Sister Anacleta has a small cross tattoo in the middle of her forehead where the tikka, the third eye, goes. I asked her about it, and she told me how, when she was 8, she stole some betel nut from her parents, and snuck off to where the villagers will tattoo you with herbs in exchange for the betel nut. Her mother had forbidden her to go, but then she went anyway. Her family was not so sympathetic when she came back, in pain from the needles from the tatoo.

We decided to play again. "This is also interesting," Sister Anacleta declared, as both she and Sister Lourdes spread the tiles. Sister Lourdes commented on the smooth feel of the tiles. The next games of banannagrams went quickly, as just Sister Lourdes, Sister Anacleta, and I played, and we went with 21 tiles instead of starting with 11. Sister Lourdes then got out their Scrabble set to count how many tiles were there compared to the banannagrams set. Their set is ancient and would probably sell as a collectors item on Ebay. They never asked, but of course I assured her that I had no plans of taking the set of banannagrams with me, and that it would be theirs from now on. She said she still wanted to see how many letters they had in their set, but I think she was happy to know the set would be staying in Damak after I left.

We've played a couple nights since. Last night they mentioned how it would be quite nice if perhaps I could send another set through the mail after I got back. It seems both Sister Anacleta and Sister Lourdes want to make sure they each have a set whenever they are called to move on. I told them I would be more than happy to oblige.

What We See in a Photograph

Time it was, and what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence, a time of confidences
Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph
Preserve your memories, they're all that's left you
-"Bookends" by Simon and Garfunkl

"Do not destroy the photographs! No writing!" one of the Nepali-speaking teachers semi-barks while handing out the photos of my students to a group of 8th graders.

I've learned that unless one of the teachers instructs the kids not to write on the backs of photographs, many will write messages to the students in NYC. They are usually in the related genres of "profession of love" and "admiration of beauty". Sometimes an im addresses is included. Some young men in the camps have tried to solicit my help in procuring im addresses of the young ladies in the photos, but no assistance has been forthcoming from my end.

Unlike their teachers, I don't stop them from writing on the backs of the pictures because there's something poignant to me about it. When I look out at the students I see a group of young people whose friends and relatives are in the process of scattering across several continents. They have things they want to tell each other. The message does not bleed through to the front of the image. So, in my eyes, nothing is destroyed.

I recently came into posession of another set of photographs. I got these when I was visiting with the cultural orientation coordinator of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Damak, so that I can also help create curriculum for the adult ESL classes here that uses more American English and supports the training they get from the IOM before they migrate. In one of those funny twists, the US is taking most of the resettled Bhutanese, and yet the adult ESL curriculum has mostly been designed by people from India and the UK. While that is fine for the most part, there are some glaring cultural and linguistic differences. When I came here, two people explained that it had come to a surprise to all when they recently learned from those refugees who had moved to America that the word restroom is used for toilet in the US. I was a little disturbed to learn that phrases that are typical (according to the Sisters--this was new to me) in English used in India, such as "Give me your introduction" were being taught to students who are moving to the US and Canada. I am on a bit of a cultural-imperialist mission right now to try to eradicate this language from the adult ESL program here. Thankfully, brother Paul is going to be overseeing this program for the year, and will be able to support the use of an English that is more authentic to the places they're resettling to.

Of course, I was also meeting with the cultural orientation director because I was very curious to learn what "cultural orientation training" means in practice. First I had to orient myself to get to the IOM office, which seemed easy at first. You can walk to the IOM and the UN from the Caritas office where I work. They are in a big compound with a high white wall and barbed wire. There is one entrance marked "staff" and another marked "visitors and refugees". Once you go in, there are lots of large vehicles for transporting the refugees for training, and otherwise it looks a like a small hotel. I got lost in one hallway of air-conditioned rooms where the Department of Homeland Security does all the interviews before finally finding the other building where the IOM is.

Anyway, the cultural orientation director at the IOM was happy to collaborate and advised me on some of the language points he believes would be helpful to develop in an adult ESL class. He also showed me a slide show to introduce me to the training. This was full of pictures, many of them very striking. Imagine a woman who looks like she just stepped off the mountains of Nepal. (In case you are drawing a blank here, the one in the photograph appeared to be almost 5 feet tall, had a gold nosering, was smiling, and was wrapped in several types of bright fabric.) Now imagine that woman sitting in a mock airplane seat, belting herself in. They practice that. They had another picture of an IOM trainer explaining toilet paper. They had another picture of all the pictures of activities that they sort into "sometimes legal, never legal, and always legal." They had pictures of jobs. (They do an activity where they match jobs and education and jobs and salaries, so that people learn that plumbers make a significant amount of money.) They have lots of pictures of houses where students get to see how much money buys which kind of housing. This helps, as he said, to "manage expectations" which is a phrase that gets tossed around a lot here.

Some of the pictures he showed me were ways of explaining abstract concepts. For example, they had a picture of three glasses. They show the students one glass of oil and water, one of orange juice, and one of water with sugar. Of course the idea is to convey that in a mixed society people can be like oil and water, apart. They can be mixed in, like orange juice. Or they can be like sugar in water. I'm not sure if they read this as basically hidden and collected at the bottom or as perfectly integrated. Of course both are problematic, but really there is no good way to talk about this.

The IOM seemed to have pictures of everything, so, I asked him if I could have copies of all the photos in order to use them in the adult ESL classes to help support this language development. As we were copying the files to my flashdrive, he said offhandedly, "Of course the thing with photographs is that you have to ask them what they see in the photograph," I asked him to say more about this, and he continued, picking up a photo of one of my students standing in the kitchen. She's leaning on a counter, and behind her there's a small blender plugged into the wall. He pointed to it. "They're going to look at this photo and say, 'What is that?' because they've never seen a blender before," he said.

I thought of all the boys who had looked at the photograph and inquired about the girl. I wondered if any of them even saw the blender. But now, I realized that I wish I'd asked more of the students this question. Mostly I'd let them point to things and ask me. I'm going to use the pictures with the adult classes this week, and so I'm looking forward to finding out more about what they see.

Song

On one of the first days I was here, during the Q&A session at the end of a class period, the questions changed from inquiries into the length of the school day to requests.

"Sing," one child prompted me, her eyes expectant.

"Please dance," requested another in perfect seriousness.

I was unprepared to sing and unwilling to dance, so instead we cheered on a few of their classmates who were happy to perform. With little prodding, first boys, then girls came forward and sang. Since that time, I've tried to leave a little time at the end of a class to sing. The kids sing beautifully in Nepali. These are always solo performances, with a few kids assuring me beforehand that the performers are very talented. They don't lie. It's quite stirring to listen to them and it is also sometimes very funny. One little boy hammed it up and sang to me something that appeared to be a love song, outstretching his arms Bollywood style, and I pretended to swoon, and we all had a good laugh. One girl sang beautifully in Hindi. Another little boy shot me a funny look and then gave a spirited rendition of the lines he knew from "Buffalo Soldier." I about fell out of my seat.

For my song, I decided on Alain Toussaint's "Yes We Can Can", made copies of the lyrics, and, the next time I had the opportunity, we sang it. Well, I sang it to them first and then we sang it together, line by line.

After, some sang out the chorus and others copied parts of it in their notebooks. A few students refused to give the paper back to me. "I want to show it to my parents," one told me, folding it and putting it in his notebook. One of the boys, who had just sang for us in Nepali, just shook his head at me. Later, as I was leaving, I saw his mouth moving silently over the words.

World Cup Finals

On Friday morning brother Peter, a Jesuit from Darjeeling who runs the young adult programs here, and I were sitting in the backseat of a truck, bouncing on a rock filled road besides "Bel-City", which is the name given to the Beldangi camps here.

That's when I saw my first satellite dish among the thatched rooves in the camp. Then I saw another. As far as I'd known, there was no electricity in the camps. But, apparently that changes when the World Cup finals come.

"Battery," is how brother Peter explained, when I asked how the satellite and TVs run. "They run a wire to power a battery." Then he smiled and said something about how the World Cup really brings everyone together. He couldn't remember the dishes being there ever before.

Wow.