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.

Eat, Drink

At about 5:15 yesterday morning I heard a knock at my door. (The sun here is full-on at 5, and so I am usually up between 5 and 5:20. The sisters are up and running, for the most part, by 4:30.) It was sister Mabel, who is super sweet and is always making sure that I have everything I need, especially when it comes to food. She makes sure I try special foods, like this snack they have in Kerala, where she is from. It's a chapati, folded with coconut, sugar, cardomom inside, then stuck it in a plantain(?) leaf, and heated on the stove. This morning, she wanted to know if, later for breakfast, I would be wanting a boiled egg.

"Sure," I told her.

At this point she noted that the last time I had eaten a boiled egg, I had not eaten the yolk.

I acknowledged that, yes, I hadn't eaten it, and wondered if I was supposed to explain at this point. I wasn't exactly awake yet.

"Okay, but then save the yolk for her," Mabel instructed me, referring to the woman who comes to cook.

I have no idea how to save an egg yolk for someone else, so I pretended I was too full, and left the egg in its shell, hoping that the woman who came to cook would eat the whole egg.

The messages about food are everywhere here. The sign below was on one of the chalk boards on the thin walls that separate classrooms. (If you can't read it: Bad men live to eat and drink whereas good men eat and drink in order to live.)

It feels like a bit of a sick joke to me to put this on a classroom wall in a refugee camp. Especially after having lunch with one of my colleagues, a fellow teacher who helps me in the classroom, here in his family's hut in the camp, I can't imagine that anyone is living to eat and drink here. That is not to say that the food is not good: the food I have had in the canteen at the refugee camps and that I ate in my colleague's house is what I prefer to eat: perfectly spiced daal, rice, vegetables, noodles, chai--yum! The people here are incredibly kind and hospitable. But, eating lunch at his house was a sobering experience.

Before I start, a few words about my colleague. He's married with two kids, an 8th grader, and I think a 6th grader. His wife is at home. He's in his mid-thirties. He finished his schooling by correspondence with a school in India, and then either Caritas or the UN sent him on scholarship for two years in India for further study. He's deciding between two places in the US to move and worries about what he'll do. Here, he trains teachers, and talks to me about differentiating curriculum and student motivation. He thinks it might be unrealistic for him to be able to do the training to stay in teaching when he resettles in the US.

"This is how we live," he announced to me, after we'd ducked under a rooftop to pass through a small alley floor of perfectly clean and smoothed mud, and stepped two feet into his hut to sit on a raised platform that is also used as a bed. On one wall was a row of hooks, where the family's clothing hung neatly along the entire wall. The slatted bamboo walls and ceiling were mostly covered with newspaper, with larger pictures of film stars I didn't recognize sometimes pasted over them. A small table on one side had a compartment that held his books from his coursework (a British novel, a text on Modern Indian History) which he got out to show me. They looked and felt damp and ancient, though they'd been printed in the mid-2000s. On the floor was a woven mat, covering the mud floor. A few steps away was a room with just enough space for a raised platform. Children on the "street" outside looked at us through the slats in the bamboo. It was too dark to see very well, and at the same time, there was no privacy. I can't imagine how anyone could feel relaxed there, and I felt relief at moving on.

When his wife had prepared lunch, we stepped across the little alley into a room, an eat-in kitchen, which he had renovated at his own expense to be apart from the other rooms, because, as he explained, otherwise the house is full of smoke and it gets in your clothes. He'd also constructed a water pump outside so that they wouldn't have to wait in line for water. He and I sat on a bench, and I faced a small fireplace where they cooked food. His son sat on a chair beside us. Wife and daughter were absent. Above where we sat, I saw where there was some firewood hidden up in the eaves. When I asked about it, he explained that his wife has to go into the forrest and that it is illegal to take the wood, but everyone does. Again, in this room it was dark, and beyond spare. I can't imagine how a family could have a relaxing meal in a situation like that. Twenty years in a kitchen like that is well beyond my ken.

I felt very sad after lunch, and so I was quite happy to be walking back to school with the students in the afternoon. Two very cute girls walked on either side of me. A feisty little one told me she liked to dance, and skipped ahead of me and wiggled her hips for me, which made me laugh. The other was tall and thin and serious, and told me she was moving to Syracuse, NY, and asked me about it and told me about her family. These girls, like the other kids, appear to be well-fed, although some of the school counselors told me that sometimes kids go to school hungry. The WFP (largely funded by the US from what others have told me) provides rations of rice, oil, and vegetables. When you go through the camp, you can see this large, barn-like structure with large sacks stacked inside. The whole operation is surrounded by huge coils of barbed wire. In a less institutionalized road, I've seen little stands where people sell vegetables. Chickens are technically not allowed, but you see them pecking their way outside the huts. One of the IOM workers explained to me that an important part of the resettlement training for the US (right up there with toilet paper) is explaining that Americans eat cow.

Based on my limited experience with food here so far, I think it's safe to say that it's all "good men" around these parts, eating and drinking in order to live. I can understand, though, how these conditions could drive a person to drink.

Links

My first day here I was ushed into a classroom to say hello, as this is what visitors do. I tried to get out of doing this, as I had to interrupt some poor teacher's lesson, which is something I find very awkward. The kids, who have seen PLENTY of westerners at this point, don't have questions for me under these circumstances. Sometimes the adults prompt them with, "What do you want to know about the life of the Bhutanese students in the US?" or gently reprimand them for not having questions, which makes me feel even more ill at ease. However, in one class, after a long silence, a girl raised her hand and looked at me and spoke in Nepali. It didn't sound like a question, and I looked at the teacher. "Tell them we remember them," she translated, and the girl smiled at me.

I found it very touching, and also symbolic of a community that is very much linked to those in the US, AUS, UK, and the Netherlands. Even though the camps don't have electricity (and they are using brickettes now instead of kerosene since the price went so high) outside the camps the Western Union and Moneygram offices line the road, where people are sending back money. I counted at least three internet cafes outside of one of the larger refugee camps, and there may be more.

Despite the fact that they have lots of contact with those abroad, they still ask questions about the schools and cities and opportunities. When we get past the obvious differences (not as many school uniforms, not standing up when teachers walk in the room in the US) it quickly moves beyond what I can answer. One girl asked about "PIT-tis-burg," giving the city three syllables, but of course I don't know anything about what life will be like there. Race in America is another thing that is difficult to talk about. One of the Bhutanese young people who was murdered in the US was killed in front of his house by an African-American young man not much older than he was. This came up in the question and answer session when I was in the camp where he lived before coming to the US. After making the mistake of starting with the fact that African-Americans have a different history in the US than other groups because they came as slaves (which got translated to: You said they were illegal immigrants, right?) I dropped that line and responded by acknowledging that what happened was tragic, and also that not everyone who has the same skin color is the same. The kids clearly still remember the young man who died in the US.

Today I was at a camp where one of my BIHS students had lived. He gave me the address of the hut where he used to live (Hut is the technical term that is used here. His family's place was maybe 200 square feet and had several rooms. The walls were made of bamboo, there was no electricity, and there was a thatched roof. ) I told him I would take some pictures of his old place and I went to look for it after a quick lunch. One of the teachers helped me, and we asked around, and were directed to the hut where members of his family live now. His old hut was gone. The teacher explained that as soon as someone leaves, they get rid of the hut, dismantling it. (I guess I had thought that maybe someone else would have moved in, but apparently it doesn't work that way when a refugee camp is in the process of closing down!) Anyway, I was able to meet my students' family members (aunts and cousins) and show them pictures of their family in the US. Showing someone a picture of her elderly mother in the US is really an amazing experience. (Explaining that I had to take the picture away so I could use it in my class was painful, but thanks to technology, at least I can email her children the pictures.) Afterwards, they gathered and we were able to take pictures. I may see them in a few months, as they will be coming to the US soon.

Knee High by the 4th of July

Well, I realized I don't have a good picture of the corn, so I opted for one of the tea plantations instead. This was taken on the way to one of the camps, which is just a little south of an area that is across the border from Darjeeling. However, the corn here was definitely not knee high by the 4th of July. It was a good 6 feet. I was talking about this with Paul, a very kind young Canadian Jesuit brother who is here, and we noted that what is true in Ohio is not so true in Nepal. On Sunday evenings the two Jesuit brothers, Paul and Peter, come with Father Amalraj to the Sisters' house, and they pray and eat together. They let me sit in on their Sunday night prayer, which was interesting (minus the massive mosquito attack on my feet). During the time in the service when people can offer prayers or other messages, Paul wished me a happy 4th of July and prayed for Obama, which was thoughtful of him. Afterwards the sisters wondered exactly how long the US had had its independence for, and then the conversation quickly turned to the more immediate details of the ground nut curry, yoghurt, rice, beans, and chicken.

Don't Forget the Motherland

This quote is what one of the camp directors, not the one whose desk is behind this map of Bhutan, told me when I asked him if he had any message he'd like me to take back. You can also see the pictures of the kings of Bhutan they have up on the wall. The idea of Bhutan is still here. Children here in school start the day with an assembly where, among other things, they recite the Bhutanese pledge. They study Dzongkha in school. That used to be just one of several languages spoken in Bhutan, which is home to people from a mix of different ethnicities. That changed, according to what I've read and what I've heard here, with the 1988 One Nation One People policy because after that only one language and one style of dress, among other things, were allowed. The use of the Nepali language in schools was outlawed. Again, according to what I've read, in 1985, citizenship for the Lhotsampa (read: Bhutanese folks in the camp) people was revoked unless they had both tax receipts showing that they'd been in the country since 1958, and if they'd been counted in the census. That, among other reasons (see Human Rights Watch reports for the gory details of persecution), is why the Lhotsampa people headed for Nepal.

When I asked one man about what he remembered his parents telling him when they decided to leave Bhutan, he said they explained it to him this way: 400 years ago (I'm paraphrasing, when this was told to me, he put it "in the time of the Nepali King X"), our people lived in Nepal. So, we're going back. He said it made sense to him at the time. He said that his family had been farming oranges and cardamom, and he'd gotten used to carrying heavy things with his head, he said, because during school holidays he would carry big sacks of oranges to sell. So, when they left Bhutan, he walked for four days with 24 kgs of rice on his head. Then there were truckers in India who took them to Nepal for 200 Rs per person (Others have told me that kindly truck drivers in India took people across for free). Then they ended up near the Mai river, then finally in the camps. (The next stop is the US, in a month.) I asked him what he's telling his kids about the move (since the line about how their people were there 400 years ago isn't really an option!) and he says that he told them that their uncle in the US has a car. Can this be true? he asked me, marveling at the idea. He'd said he'd given up on the idea of going back to Bhutan, and instead was very excited about his family's prospects in the US.

Rivers

I took this shot of the Mai river (also known by some other names) which (perhaps I can be corrected on this) is near Maidhar, which is just outside of Damak. I'm including this for a couple of reasons. The first is that it is of historical importance to the community here. In the early 1990s, when the Lhotsampa (a.k.a. the Bhutanese folks who are in the camps) left Bhutan, they first settled next to this river. That ended up being a humanitarian nightmare, according to the refugees I've talked to who remember this time. The short of it is that tens of thousands of people ended up here living in close quarters with no food and sanitation, and lots of people got dysentary (among other things) and died. After this situation came to the attention of the Nepali government and the UN, they began building the seven refugee camps that are here around the Damak.

The other reason I included it is because it's rather flooded here right now. This morning I left in a truck with one of the drivers to go to a camp that's a couple of rivers away from Damak. The driver, looking remarkably rested for a man who has a 24 day old baby at home, and I made conversation in a mix of English and Hindi, and set out on our way. We then reached a river that I guess they usually drive through when it is not a river. We stopped and the driver said we'd wait and see if anyone else could drive through it. We watched as 5 guys picked up a motorcycle and walked through, and as a huge truck carrying logs made it through. At this point a UN vehicle drove up, and stopped, and I had a nice chat with a Canadian woman who had just been posted here to do resettlement work. So then all of us watched as more people picked their way through the thigh-high water, and then the drivers decided that driving through the river was a bad idea, and so we drove back.

Classroom setup

This is a classroom in Timai camp (after we've re-arranged the room). You can see where I'm talking to the kids in the back. Kids on the right in the front are reading letters written by my students in NYC. Kids on the left are looking at photos. The only light coming in is the light from outside through the bamboo walls. These classrooms were nicer than some others. There are concrete floors. Yes, the words Speak English are written in big letters in the back of the classroom.

The basics: Where and What

Where are you?

Thanks to a grant from the Fund for Teachers, I am now in eastern Nepal. It looks like this just outside of where I live. I am living in a three story house in a small city named Damak. I am living with four 60-something South Indian sisters (Sister Mabel, Sister Anacleta, Sister Lioba, and Sister Lourdes) who were formerly school principals and hospital administrators in South India, but who have served in many other countries. They are super smart, kind, and articulate and they fuss over me like I am one of their daughters. :) They left these positions to serve in the Jesuit Refugee Services Education Program led by Father Amalraj. A family lives on the first floor of the house.

What are you doing there?

Each day I visit the 8th graders at a different school at a different refugee camp and share about life in NYC. A Bhutanese refugee (either a school administrator or one of their teachers) comes with me to translate in case they have questions they want to ask me in Nepali. Many of these children are in the process of being resettled to the US or to other countries. When I walk into a classroom and ask who is moving to the US, often over half of the hands in the room go up. (I am hardly the first foreigner they've seen--there were people here from NC and California earlier in the week. Many foreigners come here.)

When I go into their classroom (think: no electricity, bamboo slatted walls, thatched roof, maybe a concrete floor, maybe a dirt floor, one blackboard, long tables in rows with benches) I re-arrange it so that there are three stations. I give one group of students about 100 photographs taken by the Bhutanese students at Brooklyn International High School. I give another group of students letters written by my seniors from the class of 2010 from Brooklyn International High School. They read the letters and write letters to my students. With the third group, I talk to them about one of my students who moved from the camp to the US, show them his school papers so that they know what they need to bring with them, and show them how we transfer credits at my school, and talk to them about differences between classrooms in the US and classrooms in the schools in the camps in Nepal.

During and after this whole process they ask questions and I answer as honestly as I can. Sometimes I can answer affirmatively (Yes, we study math and science in the U.S.) Sometimes I answer negatively (No, you don't have to wear a uniform at most schools in the U.S.) Sometimes I am at a loss. (I am not qualified to say whether or not you can play on the World Cup team if you move to the U.S. )

Besides this, they've also been kind enough to give me an orientation to the camp schools, so that I have an idea of what the schedule is like and what they study. I may also be helping with the adult spoken English program here while the kids are in testing.