The dasho always means what he says. For several years he has been on a sanitation crusade in Bumthang, and he enforces it with a reign of terror. He stalks the byways of Jakar and the villages of the surrounding hills and valleys, paying unannounced visits to hidden corners of backyards in search of stashed trash. Children flee noiselessly but speedily at his approach. Grabbing whatever stick is at hand, he attacks discarded tires, paper scraps, and plastic bags, ordering grown men into the street to pick up the mess publicly. Fines are liberally awarded on the spot.
“The fear is there, and they have to do it,” he said as we bounced along in his Land Cruiser one day. “Once they learn, I remove all the punishments. One and a half years back I was disliked,” he acknowledged, leaving the rest of us to wonder how he judged his popularity at this point. “Of course, I went maybe a bit too far, beating up about four people. But later they realized that having a clean environment around their own households was for their own good. Most of the villagers, you know, walk barefoot. That worm that enters through the foot could be wiped out, so the cleanup is a preventive measure. Second thing, if they have a clean stove, eye problems will be solved. If you have clean drinking water, then all the diseases like diarrhea, dysentery, cholera can be prevented. Similarly, if you have a healthy body, then for so much development and field work you want to do, there can be good participation.
“You see a lot of smokes coming up from the villages?” he asked, sweeping his arm triumphandy over the surrounding mountains. “They’re burning up their dirt!”
The dasho, an agriculture expert of some standing, says he became an apostle of sanitation in a Christian boarding school in the Indian hill station of Kalimpong, where Scottish missionaries made all the boys clean their own rooms and bathrooms. The relationship between cleanliness and progress (if not godliness) was seared into his soul by those austere Presbyterians of Dr. Graham’s Homes, the school where many Bhutanese boys have been educated over the past three-quarters of a century. The legacy of J. A. Graham, who had been a tutor of Bhutan’s second king and was founder of the school, is imprinted across the Himalayas in small pockets of order. Graduates now in their thirties and forties also account for a significant part of the Himalayan intellectual and literary elite.
Dasho Pem Dorji says he was impressed by the equality and sense of responsibility he learned in Kalimpong, a town that more than a century ago was Bhutanese. When he heard recently that the more affluent shopkeepers of Jakar were thinking of hiring Indian outcaste “sweepers” to do their cleaning for them, as Thimphu property owners do, he forbade the practice before it began in Bumthang. Instead, he placed green bins labeled “Use Me” around shops and in settlements, and ordered that the townspeople start learning to pick up their own rubbish. A blizzard of edicts flowed from his feudal sword.
“You want to sell sweets?” he asked rhetorically. “If the people who come to your shop throw sweet papers, it is your duty to pick them up and tell them, put rubbish in the Use Me box. Every week, I’ve asked the district engineer to dig eight-by-eight-foot temporary pits where they will throw the rubbish from the Use Me bins, and they will burn it. Every Sunday I will inspect. If they don’t clean up, the first punishment is a one-hundred-ngultrum [about four dollars] fine. The second punishment is one week of sweeping the town. The third punishment is carrying three weeks of stone to the dzong without payment. This has to be done to teach people, you dirty, you clean. If your dzongda can clean his own bathroom, you can clean your own rubbish. So this is the thing I am trying to teach. I hope to succeed in a year.”
Later in the safety of a cluttered shop, the proprietor, who had been sitting on a stool watching the dasho cut a swath through someone’s shed, allowed that the dzongda had made a difference to the quality of life—or anyway, the cleanliness of gutters and the narrow earthen streets he had ordered paved with stone for drainage. “The people are all scared of him,” she said. “But after he goes? They’ll go back to the old ways.” She shrugged and grinned. But she wiped the counter and tidied up some sacks just in case. Her small daughter streaked past with a surprised puppy about to be thrown out the door.
This Sunday in Bumthang, it was the turn of the dzongda’s deputy, the dzongrab, Khandu Tshering, to make the weekly inspection tour. We dropped in on the Sunday market. Stallholders rushed forward to present their best domas, betel chews, to the dzongrab, an elegant older gentleman in a spotless black gho and silken knee socks whose air of reserve and deliberation served as a perfect foil to the manic style of the dzongda. The dzongrab may have commanded more respect than fear, but a lot of subtle, even furtive, tidying up was going on all around him nonetheless. On the way back to Wangdicholing, with the dzongrab at the wheel, we inadvertently hit a dog headed toward the dzong but did it no evident harm.
Dzongrab Khandu Tshering cares a lot about sanitation, too, he said as he sat for a while in the Wangdicholing Guesthouse garden answering questions from me and from Kate Wyatt, a psychologist in the American seminar group, who was eager to know whether life in Buddhist Bhutan had its built-in buffers against psychological strain and mental illness. The dzongrab did not disappoint her. He said that stress and psychological problems were not a major concern among the Bhutanese, who often turn to a lama for help in the kind of personal crisis that would send an urbanized Westerner to a psychiatrist or analyst. In Thimphu, I had heard of a young man educated in Australia who on his return was unable to reconcile himself to Bhutanese family life and worship. He had gone to a lama for advice. Together, he and the lama were negotiating their way through Buddhism to help the young man understand what his ancestors’ faith could still offer a science graduate who had ceased to believe in the myths and rituals on which he was raised.
“In many ways, maybe a lama can help head off mental problems,” the dzongrab said. But he had reservations about jumping to the conclusion that Buddhism can unfailingly provide balm for troubled minds. “It is entirely dependent on the individual who is mentally in trouble. When he goes to lama, lama will from different angles try to make him understand by telling all the good things about religion. Some can change their minds and outlook after listening to the holy lamas. Some will not. We are not all the same.”
Dzongrab Khandu Tshering—a tall man with a strong, high-cheek-boned, tanned and weathered face that would become an ancient warrior—was introduced to me as a former “royal compounder” and a repository of information on the history of medicine in Bhutan. He began his career in the 1950s as a master of traditional remedies before Bhutan had Western-style doctors or any significant interchange with the outside world. He had been witness to a medical revolution.
“A compounder is just like a pharmacist,” he explained in his quiet, methodical manner. “He made some diagnoses and gave medicine, because at that time there was not a qualified doctor in the country. A few Bhutanese were beginning to be trained abroad as doctors, but in the meantime, the government established dispensaries in all the districts to look after the ill people. Three of us were taught first locally in Bhutan and India. After three years, we three were sent for further training in a mission hospital in Kalimpong. We were there for two and a half more years. Local diagnosis and treatment we learned from there. After finishing the course, we came back, and I joined in Tongsa district in 1957 as district in charge. I was in Tongsa as dispensary in charge for twelve years. After that I was posted to the old Thimphu General Hospital, just near the dzong, where I was training officer and head compounder. In 1972, during the coronation time, the new general hospital in Thimphu was opened, and again I was appointed as administrative officer.” A few years later, he was moved out of health and into general administration, reaching the highest levels of royal government service.
“Now I don’t have any time to concentrate on the medical system. But sometimes, when I go to villages on tour, I explain to the public personal hygiene, cleaning up and that sort of thing,” the dzongrab said. “The health of the people is far b
etter now than earlier. In the ancient time, there was VD; now there is no VD at all. In the ancient time, there was a lot of this tuberculosis. Now there is very little tuberculosis; it has been controlled a lot. There was a lot of goiter. Now we have very few because we have iodized.”
Family planning has been more difficult, even in this progressive district. “Those who have understood the benefits are coming forward themselves,” he said. “But the main thing is that most of the Bhutanese are religious-minded people and believe that religion says, if you do family planning it is one of the great sins. The people keep this in mind. So most of them don’t want to undergo family planning. So now we, from all the different angles—from administrative side, from medical side—we’re trying to convince them that three, four is okay, but more than four is very difficult to maintain. They can’t give the education properly to their children, the clothing, everything. It is a great problem.”
Bumthang has a model hospital that, like smaller clinics elsewhere, is designed to bridge quite literally new and older forms of medicine. The building has two wings: one for traditional methods of healing and one for Westernized care. Patients are encouraged to move across the sheltered walkway between the traditional and modern wings depending on their instincts and the nature of their illnesses or injuries. In Bumthang, the dzongrab said, efforts are also being made to wean people away from a reliance on lamas in times of illness. Throughout Bhutan, where most villages have basic health units but hospitals are few and widely scattered, precious hours can be lost when a sick person first goes or is taken to a monastery or temple to undergo healing rituals.
“If there is some evil, some spiritual problem, the lama can do something by worship of the god, doing some puja or something like that, something traditional,” the dzongrab said. “But it is also very necessary to use hospitals. The local people, most of them rely on religion first, then on medicine. Now we have been trying to convince them whenever they feel unwell—something cold, hot, something like that—then and there they must attend a medical person. We try to explain this to them. And on the lamas’ side, also, we have a program. We try to use them as media. All the lamas go on invitation to villages frequently. So the government thought, maybe also we can use the lamas as messengers, so that they can also motivate the people to go to the hospital when they find someone sick. So we are using the lamas like the women’s associations and the posters as motivators for progress.”
Because Bumthang has as easy a relationship with foreigners as it has with new ideas, it is an especially good candidate for experimental development projects. One of the first to succeed here was the Swiss Dairy, built by the Swiss development agency, Helvetas. The agency also gave Bumthang one of its most eccentric and beloved citizens, Fritz Maurer, who came to help and stayed to marry a Bhutanese woman and raise a family in an alpine setting not unlike that of a high Swiss valley. Not satisfied with milk alone, Maurer has branched into a line of delicatessen products produced in a processing plant in a hamlet across the Bumthang Chhu from Jakar and sold in a small shop next door that doubles as a bar and tearoom.
His gho casually askew, workworn, and soiled in the tradition of the Bhutanese countryside, Maurer walks briskly through the small cheese factory and drink-bottling plant that has made Bumthang the gourmet capital of the country. Words like “factory” and “plant” need some elaboration in the Bumthang context. The Fauchons of Bhutan is a large shed with a perennially puddled concrete floor around the sloshing bottle washers and rumbling brewery vats that make juices and alcoholic drinks from local produce. But open a heavy door to the cheese works and you are led to a cool, dry, dark room to stand in the presence of world-class Emmentaler, Gruyère, or maybe Gorgonzola, depending on what kind the cheesemaster is concentrating on that week.
“Have some, and tell me what you think,” Maurer says, slicing through a Gorgonzola wheel and extracting a creamy slice of pungent cheese. “We’re still working on this; I’m not sure it’s right yet.” We go next door to the small outlet-shop-cum-café for biscuits, juice, and coffee to round out the feast. The cheese is superb. No wonder this unusual local product is sold out as soon as a batch is ready for marketing. News that a new shipment of cheese or apple juice or honey from Bumthang has arrived in Thimphu, more than a hundred miles away, can cause a stampede to Shop Number Seven, the exclusive purveyor in the Bhutanese capital for the specialties of Bumthang. All over the country, people taste-test some new alcoholic concoction to emerge from Bumthang’s vats: herbal brandy, for example, or an unusual fruit wine.
The little shop-café next to the cheese works, where Bhutanese and foreigners vie for Maurer’s specialties, seems to be striving for an ambience to match its international reputation. While waiting one day for the dzongda to return from one of his impromptu sanitation inspections, I took an inventory of the decor. To the sound of monks chanting in the next room, the storekeeper’s family temple, I counted more than twenty photographs of Switzerland pasted to the walls of the two-table café, along with a picture of a South Indian temple, two Sylvester Stallone posters, a picture of a Druk Air BAE-146, and another of Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong. Most intriguing was a glossy portrait of a kitten wedged in a gigantic hamburger roll, with layers of cheese, lettuce, and tomatoes on its furry head. An inscription read, in full: “You cannot omelettes without breaking eggs.”
I asked Fritz Maurer once if he ever misses Switzerland. He didn’t seem to think the question meant much. “I go back now and then,” he said. “But I am happy here. And I could live anywhere, I think—except in a hot tropical place.” He had been to Bangkok, which he fled.
Heiko Dekena, a German horticulturist who came to Bhutan more recently to help the Bhutanese develop a seed industry, was more effusive when I went to visit his National Seed and Plant Production Program’s experimental farm just before dusk on a long, lazy Sunday in Bumthang. Dekena, a crisply tailored, no-nonsense administrator, had spent decades in the developing world, mostly in Africa and Asia, and this would be his last assignment before retirement, he explained. Hardened by years of working in environments of violence and corruption, he was unprepared for Bhutan. After a wonderfully productive year in the country, he was ready to stay a decade. Coolly scientific when talking about his seed-producing plants, he suddenly became passionate on the subject of Bhutan and the Bhutanese.
“I feel for this country with my whole heart,” he said, as we drove up a trackless hillside, fording crystal streams to reach the seed fields. “I love Bhutan so much, like I have never fallen in love with any other place. This is one of the advantages of my work here. It makes life for us very easy. I have no problems at all. I find so much understanding and intelligence. If I want to explain something, I really have interested listeners. I have never felt it so easy to come close to the people.”
As the sun was sinking, Heiko Dekena and I returned to the Bhutanese house he and his wife, Cristel, have furnished and decorated with the work of local craftspeople. He reminded me it was the first Sunday in Advent, and there was a homemade Apfelkuchen for the occasion, along with coffee and a bowlful of whipped fresh local cream. Around a handsome table in that cozy room glowing with golden wood paneling, we might have been in Bavaria, or a small town in Switzerland, Schlagsahne and all.
It was not only comfort that the Dekenas had found here in Bumthang, but also trust and friendship. The adaptable Bhutanese meet outsiders as equals and work as colleagues, giving or taking advice as the moment requires. There is great integrity and wisdom here, Dekena said, as he walked through the barnyard of his high-altitude experimental farm sloping down from a hilltop over nine thousand feet above the Bumthang Valley. Expensive imported farm machinery is left undisturbed in isolated, unlocked sheds. Dekena said he could leave a million dollars on the table in his office and it would not be touched. In return, he says, he tries to understand without criticizing the farming methods of the rural Bhutanese, who he believes are depleting the land and degrading seed s
tock by overworking small plots in traditional ways.
“I can’t call it primitive, because there is nothing on earth that is primitive,” he said. “It’s just a different way of life, a different way of working. When people have lived here for such a long period, then we have to accept that. But on the other side, we are here to improve something. It’s not a question of being critical. It’s more or less asking whether if something is going on on the right side maybe it is also possible to do it on the left side, and so on. Just to give the idea.”
From what Dekena has seen and experienced in Bumthang, he believes that Bhutan stands a good chance of developing its small economy without losing its spiritual culture or destroying the rural social fabric—or the village farming system—because it came into the foreign-aid game late, after many other countries had made serious mistakes. He applauds the determination of the royal government to make its own decisions, not to be whipsawed by powerful international agencies with prepackaged programs and agendas of their own, often concocted in cultural vacuums continents away.
So Close to Heaven Page 32