There are four cubicles for men and four for women, none with doors. A corridor separates them from view and from the family but there is an open drain, so the smell of urine and excrement hangs heavily over us. The family has two small rooms of their own. One is the size of a toilet cubicle with a gas ring for cooking. The other has a queen-size mattress that touches three of the walls, leaving only about half a square metre of the floor for the whole family to live, eat and sleep. On a shelf, a rented television shows Hindi soapies. Pinned to the grimy walls are posters of Hindu gods.
Metho explains that we are from Bhutan Observer and would like to write a story about her family. Rita looks surprised but shyly agrees. She sits in the middle of the mattress, a tangle of sleeping children’s limbs on and around her. I watch in admiration as Metho slips into Hindi and draws out Rita’s story, taking notes and translating as she goes.
Rita is 30 and was born in Bengal, India. Her father, a sweeper with Thimphu City Corporation, was hurt by a bomb blast. He is now partially blind with an injured hand, so he cannot work. He lives in the border town of Phuentsholing, about seven hours’ drive away. Because the bomb blast was on government premises, Rita and her family are allowed to live rent-free in these rooms. Even with the language barrier I can hear the pride in her voice as she gestures around her.
Rita acts as caretaker and the people who use the toilet give her a few ngultrum. It can add up to Nu.30–40 a day (A$1), which she says helps. The people are kind and sometimes give Nu.5 (A$0.14) to the children. The family’s main income, though, is from sweeping: Rita sweeps a local office block and her husband sweeps government offices. The family – two adults and four children – shares this queen-size mattress.
Rita tells Metho that she sees me going to work each day. She smiles at me. I say I like her children; they always seem to be having fun. She explains they are sleeping now because they are tired after their cold bucket bath that morning.
She is chatty and warm, a woman comfortable in her own skin and her own home. She talks about her husband. It was an arranged marriage. They came to Thimphu when their eldest child was just three months old. He is a good man, strict with the children when he is around. They are a handful when he is away.
Metho asks if there is anything I would like to ask. We have a short discussion in English about the fact that this woman and her family live in a toilet block. Metho is as shocked by this as me. We discuss that what we really want to know is if she is happy living here. But how do you ask that without implying you don’t think she should be?
Metho thinks for a moment, then turns to Rita and they talk for a few minutes. When Metho turns back to me she is grinning.
‘She feels privileged to have a home. She says the people who sweep the roads don’t have homes and she knows how incredibly lucky she is. Her oldest children are going to school and she wants them to learn Dzongkha. Her dream is that all her children grow up in Bhutan, become educated and learn Dzongkha. She doesn’t want to go back to India because there is no work. Here she has a home and work. She says she is really content with her life.’
Rita adds something in Hindi and Metho translates.
‘She says if you have more you just want more.’
Rita gives a huge broad smile.
On the way back to the office, Metho marvels at Rita. She has walked past the family for the six months she has worked at Bhutan Observer and not given her much thought. Now she considers her a revelation.
She writes a lovely feature for the next edition, which appears under the headline ‘The happy little home’, ending with Rita’s sage-like advice, which struck such a chord with Metho. ‘Her answer is a reminder that the secret of contentment is knowing how to enjoy what one has,’ she writes.
After meeting Rita I stop thinking of them as the ‘poor family in the toilet’. I find myself watching them and wondering about the nature of poverty and happiness, and about attitude. Rita’s attitude. My attitude. The difference between feeling pity and having empathy. When I feel content, and when I feel like I don’t have enough. It feels like a slippery measure that has me at one end one day and the opposite end on another day. I remember Krishnamurti, the Indian philosopher, talking about the evils of comparison. He said comparison was degrading and perverted one’s outlook. I ponder what it might be like never to compare or be compared. The idea that they are poor but happy irritates me. There is so much poverty around me – grinding, heartbreaking, demoralising poverty – and by no stretch of the imagination can it be good to be poor. Still, Rita doesn’t seem to think in terms of poor or not poor, and I should not impose them on her. It is patronising. And limiting. Wrong in ways I am just beginning to glimpse.
The confusion swirls around inside my head. I do not come up with any profound insights. But after meeting Rita and her family, and seeing their lives through their eyes, I start to realise how much I perceive the world through my preconceptions. It prevents me from seeing anything as it might really be. I decide that everything I think I know could very well be wrong. And I cannot begin to explain why that makes me happy.
19
Forbidden Topics
On 13 March 2009, a 46-year-old woman is beaten to death by a mob of 14 villagers who believe she is possessed by Satan. While her husband and two daughters watch, the woman is beaten with a bamboo stick and spade handle. Villagers then tie a rope around her neck and hang her from an orange tree.
The villagers, from Dorokha, had recently converted to Christianity and were attending a prayer meeting in their pastor’s farmhouse. They decided to kill the mother of five because she would not convert and was therefore clearly possessed by Satan. It was a massive frenzy of bloodlust unlike anything Bhutan had ever seen. According to Kuensel:
Dorokha police said that most of the members of the group were ‘acting like mad, putting the bible on their heads, staring at us, shouting at us’. ‘They looked very frightening and they shouted at us “you are evil too and you will be put to death very soon, etc.”,’ said a Dorokha police constable. ‘We had to get the help of local leaders and about 18 village volunteers to escort the accused group to Samtse,’ he said.
The brutal event shocked Bhutan, but it was also seen by many to be inevitable. That’s what Christians do. Siok Sian Pek-Dorji tells me that the modern experience of Christianity on this continent is often the hellfire-and-brimstone preachers who exhort sinners to repent or be damned. They are religious extremists inflaming rural communities. India and Nepal have wrestled with religious violence and scenes like the Dorokha killing since the early 20th century, when missionaries started coming from Europe to save their souls.
Christianity is a vexed issue in this kingdom with its new constitution, which guarantees ‘freedom of thought, conscience and religion’ but also states that ‘Buddhism is the spiritual heritage of Bhutan, which promotes the principles and values of peace, non-violence, compassion and tolerance’. Roughly three-quarters of the country consider themselves Buddhist, about one quarter of the population is Hindu, and a small number have converted to Christianity. Islam is almost negligible, and Judaism doesn’t figure at all, except perhaps among the expat community.
What this means in practice is that Hinduism happily coexists with Buddhism in Bhutan. There are Hindu temples in Thimphu and throughout the south, and the whole country joins in some of their religious holidays. The Bhutanese also have no problem with Islam, small as it is. Only Christianity is a struggle.
In some respects, Christianity has a good reputation. A Canadian Jesuit priest, Father William Mackey, is widely credited with bringing modern education into the country. He was a headmaster in India in the 1960s when he fell out with the country’s leaders and was to be deported. The Third King invited him to Bhutan to establish an education system, but set one condition: that the priest would not try to convert anybody. Father Mackey agreed. He moved to Bhutan and stayed for 30 years. He est
ablished a modern school system and, true to his word, did not try to convert anyone to Catholicism. When he died in Thimphu in 1995, he was commemorated as a much-loved figure.
Father Mackey’s non-aggressive version of Christianity is welcomed. And the Bhutanese who convert to Christianity when they travel abroad to study are free to practise it when they come home. What they are not allowed to do is try to convert anyone else. Bhutan’s constitution expressly forbids pressuring people to convert. ‘No person shall be compelled to belong to another faith by means of coercion or inducement.’
Missionaries are refused visas, though they still get in, coming across the border from India to liberate the Bhutanese from their supposed spiritual darkness. It is this type of evangelical Christianity – spreading the word of Christ, saving sinners, bringing others to God – that conflicts with Bhutan’s culture. These Christians are supposed to ‘save’ everybody else, as they believe it would be lacking compassion to leave others on a path that is taking them straight to hell, but that view is incompatible with Bhutan’s own ideal of tolerance.
Prime Minister Jigmi Y Thinley explained it succinctly in an interview with Christian organisation Compass:
I view conversions very negatively, because conversion is the worst form of intolerance. The first premise is that you believe that your religion is the right religion, and the religion of the convertee is wrong – what he believes in is wrong, what he practises is wrong, that your religion is superior and that you have this responsibility to promote your way of life, your way of thinking, your way of worship. It is the worst form of intolerance. And it divides families and societies.
Any kind of proselytisation that involves economic and material incentives [is wrong]. Many people are being converted on hospital beds in their weakest and most vulnerable moments. And these people are whispering in their ears that ‘there is no hope for you. The only way that you can survive is if you accept this particular religion.’ That is wrong.
The Prime Minister says Christians misunderstand Buddhism, specifically the icons and statues, which they see as false idols. To Buddhists, however, these icons represent different aspects of their own mind, and are inherently empty of any substance.
‘To say that, “Your religion is wrong, worshipping idols is wrong” … who worships idols? We don’t worship idols. Those are just representations and manifestations that help you to focus,’ he says.
Last year a man was sentenced to three years’ jail on proselytising charges for preaching and screening movies on Christianity in two villages. He was accused of attempting to promote civil unrest. The length of the sentence shows how seriously the authorities view such behaviour.
This kind of response to evangelical Christianity has landed Bhutanese on international Christian watchlists. The organisation Gospelgo, which is based in India, has accused Bhutan of ‘Talibanizing its Christian population’.
The Dorokha Christian killing is reported on, discussed and analysed in the newspapers as Bhutanese try to wrestle with the issues it raises. What does the constitution say about religion? What is tolerance? Are churches banned? This public discussion is a first for Bhutan. Christianity has been one of the no-go areas for the Bhutanese media.
As far as I can tell, there are four such topics in Bhutan. Anything negative about the Kings and the royal family; the refugees from southern Bhutan; the sometimes-flexible borders with China; and Christianity. On these sensitive matters, there has been virtually no public discussion. Once again, it is not the government or the Kings who keep these issues out of the newspapers. They do not telephone the proprietors and have a quiet word. It is the editors themselves who do not give them oxygen. In the same way they understand their readers do not want to read gossip or anything else negative about their Kings, they also understand what will and won’t work within their society.
The fact that Christianity is being openly discussed in the pages of the newspapers indicates the beginning of an opening, a loosening up, part of the freedom brought by democracy. The editors-in-chief have not sought permission from anyone to start publishing commentary about Christianity. They sensed the time was right. The circumstances of the country have changed.
The situation with the borders are considered to be a matter of national security, but the refugee issue, after decades of silence, could be next to find its way into the pages of the newspapers. It is due to be discussed in parliament, along with citizenship, so it will inevitably be reported and move into public discussion.
In the 1980s, Bhutan was facing a growing problem in the south among their Lhotshampa population, who are of Nepalese ethnicity. After decades of living in the region and raising families, some had integrated with the Bhutanese way of life and some hadn’t. More arrived illegally, fleeing poverty in Nepal. As numbers grew, some southern Bhutanese wanted more official representation of their Nepalese culture. Tensions culminated in terrorist bombings and clashes with the Royal Bhutan Army.
People needed to be able to prove they or their family had lived in Bhutan before 1958. According to the international press, some of the police and local government officials who enacted the new laws were bullies and corrupt, and they report shocking stories of brutality, which go unreported inside Bhutan. Fearing for their safety, 100,000 Nepalese-speaking southern Bhutanese fled to Nepal, where they spent the next 15 years in UN refugee camps. All of them have since been resettled in countries including the USA, Canada, Australia, Norway and Denmark.
As a foreigner, it is hard to make sense of how the Bhutanese feel about it now. It seems there is lingering confusion, anger, shame and fear. The issue is not discussed with foreigners and not mentioned in the media.
Dolma is one result of the policies. She lives in an awful state of non-citizenship, scared she could be deported any day. But in the newspaper office are half-a-dozen journalists and advertising staff from southern Bhutan who have integrated completely. They consider themselves thoroughly Bhutanese, from the hems of their ghos to the edges of their kabneys. I also come across southern Bhutanese Hindus of Nepalese descent in the civil service, business community and monasteries.
But still that tumultuous time casts a pall. For the Bhutanese, it is the elephant in the room, rarely discussed, but across the borders in Nepal it is a popular topic. The Nepalese media is scathing about Bhutan, sometimes to the point of hysteria.
Needrup goes to Kathmandu for a few days to attend an international media conference. He comes back bemused by discussions about Bhutan. He sat on a panel on the first day and told of his experience launching an independent newspaper and how democracy had just arrived in Bhutan. He was followed by a web journalist from a refugee camp in Nepal, who claimed the press in Bhutan was suppressed and the country had no judiciary. The Bhutan he described was not one Needrup recognised, and Needrup found himself in heated arguments with a number of journalists.
‘A German woman wouldn’t believe we weren’t suppressed,’ he tells me. ‘I told the Bhutanese web journalist that they must stop printing untruths. It is the first tenet of journalism to tell the truth and they are not. They say we have no judiciary. We have a judiciary.
‘There is self-censorship. But things are changing. A year ago we wouldn’t have written about the Christian killings. That was a sensitive issue. In a year we will be writing about the refugee issue. We are openly critical of the government. The government doesn’t tell us what to write. They don’t sit on our shoulder.’
Perhaps understandably, it is hard for the press in Nepal to see beyond the traumatic experiences of the refugees. For them, it seems to define Bhutan, and as a result they make other, unfair judgments about Bhutan.
I understand Needrup’s indignation. I have sat in on Bhutan Observer news conferences and observed the process from discussing a topic to pulling together a story – how it is edited, where it goes in the newspaper – then seeing the reaction from readers and how Need
rup decides which letters to publish. I have been privy to how he and the editors make their decisions and the pressures they face. Bhutan Observer may have problems, including getting ministers to talk to them, but government interference in what they publish is not one of them. Even in its infancy, the relationship between the government and growing independent media is robust.
I also appreciate what Needrup means by self-censorship. Every editor everywhere in the world does it. Obviously, the better an editor understands their readers’ sensibilities, the more successful they are as an editor. The Bhutan Times editors have been learning the hard way, through incidents such as the public outcry after they published the photograph of the dead foetus. But self-censorship is complicated and, in this small society where everybody knows everybody, it requires a particular skill. I ask Kinley Dorji what it was like when there was only Kuensel. Was he censored? He tells me of a story he spiked many years ago, about the director of the Department of Livestock.
‘I knew he was the best director we could have. Bhutan had a small pool of people who know about livestock. Then he went and messed up a project. Messed it up completely. I knew that if I wrote the story the Fourth King would read it and the man would lose his job. And I knew he was the best person to do that job. So what to do? Is it truth at all costs? We had all the proof. But at that stage I knew he was the second person trained in livestock in the whole country. If he went, who would replace him? A civil servant who had no clue about livestock planning? So I made the decision not to run the story.’
He says the topic came up when he was doing his master’s degree at Columbia. ‘I discussed this in a class. Some kids said, “You had to write it, it is the truth. It happened.” But I was in a different situation. I had a different level of responsibility.
‘I remember the Columbia professor, a former journalist, said that this is the problem. In our search for the truth we ignore our responsibilities. It’s a decision we actually have to make. In a newspaper hierarchy, of course a reporter doesn’t think of all those things. But as you grow older and become more senior in an organisation you do have to start to think about those wider implications. You start making broader decisions.
The Dragon's Voice Page 16