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.