Regalia

I'm not even Bhutanese and I was afraid. The newly coronated 5th Druk Gyalpo (King) of Bhutan -- K5 for short - stood 10 feet away from me. Needless to say, this was the first time that Tommy Chupein, the kid from Americana, Pennsylvania was in the same room as the King of a country. I know I am not supposed to look at him -- I bowed my head the whole time, but I could not resist rolling my eyes up into my head so I could catch a sheepish glance at His Majesty until I gave myself a terrible headache. I am sure I was not alone in the room that day as people sneaked looks.

Never a dull moment in my Bhutan summer, I was invited to attend the opening of the National Assembly on Thursday. Let's just say it is not exactly like a U.S. Congressional session with all its blowhard, self-important, posturing speeches. The King arrives at the Assembly by a walking procession (unfortunately, he no longer rides a horse) with monks carrying prayer flags,, blowing flutes and long Himalayan trumpets, and beating drums. First, the public enters the beautiful Assembly hall in their finest clothes, even wearing traditional silk-embroidered boots, which, by the way, are the coolest boots ever made -- and I am coming back to Massachusetts with a pair.

Then, enter the government officials -- each one's rank clear by the color of their kabney (scarf). Green for judges, Blue for MPs, Orange for Ministers, and of course, Yellow for His Majesty. The entire rooms sits silent as the King enters and prostrates to the altars. The monks enter and take their seats. Then, come a parade of bare-footed servants who offer gifts to the King and to all the MPs....tea, a handful of rice, betelnut, various fruits, and sweets. This ceremony is accompanied by monks chanting prayers and lasts for over 30 minutes, the entire room in silence. The King sits on his throne, with the lighting over him appropriately shadowed to give him some privacy.

The Assembly Hall is exquisite. The golden throne is flanked by two exceptionally large thangkas, one of Guru Rimpoche (Padmasambhava) and the other of Zhabdrung, the 17th century unified of Bhutan. The ceiling is elaborately painted with the 8 auspicious symbols of the Buddhism. On the walls are builtout replicas of traditional Bhutanese verandas, its windows enclosed in glass.

Like all special events and in all temples, no cameras are permitted. So, I had to take it all in so that I would remember the images and the sounds for my lifetime. My mom always marvels at how "little Rita Chupein from Southwest Philly ever got to travel to places like Rome and Paris." I sat in the Assembly -- in Thimphu, Bhutan -- thinking of my mother and father and how I wish I could call them and say thank you because I have no idea how "little Tommy Chupein from Wallingford, PA. ever ended up halfway around the world watching the opening session of the National Assembly in the presence of the King of the Land of the Thunder Dragon." And so goes another surreal moment in this pretty damn amazing summer.

Falling in Love

The magic of Bhutan is washing over me --- like the clouds that float by my house at eye level and the plethora of forested streams that wind their way down the innumerable mountains that encircle me.

I am falling in love. With a place. Every direction I turn I feel inspired. Cleansed. Clear. Healed. Quieter. More at peace. I feel ridiculous saying this -- I am falling into the well-worn groove the Shangri-la discourse. But, whatever -- this is how I feel here. It's just a really easy place to BE.

Yesterday was one of those days when the Excel demons decided to foil me at every drag of the cursor. I left the office feeling frustrated and walked out tired. I looked up at yet another smiling face who said, "Hi" reaching out his hand at me. "Where do you work?" I said, "GNHC" and he said, "Oh, that's why you look so happy." I laughed because of the irony of the observation -- then I realized he had an orange kargey (scarf) over his gho and I was like, "Wait, that's a high ranking." Then, I saw his giant sword at his side and realized he was a Minister. This happened just hours after I met someone who may be able to introduce me to the King (K5) before I leave. Let's hope that happens!

I walked away, thinking...I need to walk home the 45 minutes up the mountain. It was particularly cool and cloudy with a fresh breeze coming from the south over the grasses where the guys play archery and the little kids run around with their heads popping out now and then. With each step I climbed, different views appeared -- more little round-headed, red-cheeked little munchkins running around and any frustrations I felt about work melted away. All the kids playing their little stone throwing game said hi to me. All the women gave me shy smiles. Thankfully, the perpetually anxious dogs remained sleeping. I bought some chocolate.

I ate it and one little boy was playing on the wall. He threw a tire onto the sidewalk, getting ready to roll it up the hill with his stick. I gave him a little piece of chocolate (something I rarely do for ethical reasons) but he is my neighbor and so I made an exception. His little friend saw that he had chocolate and then he started running after me quick as he could. He was only 4 or so, so he didn't speak any English yet. I said, "What is it you want, little friend." He just smiled. I said, "I think I know what you want, Spiderman." (He had a Spiderman shirt on.) I said, "Chocolate?" And he started laughing and put his hand over his mouth...hehe. He was so happy with his little chocolate.

I came home and cooked a giant, spicy curry with fresh, local, organic vegetables and then sat down to read an entire book of Bhutanese folk tales in just one night. Strange, magical stories that hypnotize you. So, the idiocy of frustration from a job led to an evening that put everything back in place.

Tonight, I met Ugyen -- the English teacher at Dechen Phodrang, the monastery just about Tashichhodzong where I work. He introduced me to the Principal monk of the school/monastery. Like all the monasteries, this one is situated in a paradise. It overlooks the entire Thimphu valley with the Wangchhu (river) winding its way through in front of you, pale green-grey like a big snake. Just under the cliff are all the terraced rice paddies with the Dzong in the background -- it's golden lights breaking up the grey of dusk. The white prayer flags flapping beside the temple high above --- get the drift? It's absurdly beautiful here -- almost unearthly -- at least more peaceful, secluded, and safe like a big blanket than anywhere else I have ever been.

I am very happy here and think more and more often how nice it would be to come back again for a longer stay. I am falling in love with this beautiful Kingdom. I hope everyone who reads these words gets the chance to see it someday.

Why am I not an Indian laborer?

Every morning I stand in my bedroom and look out the window as I put on my button-down shirt and tie the noose - I mean tie - around my neck. My view is of a house getting built - which, of course, is the job of Indian laborers from West Bengal...with their thick black hair cut in good-boy hairstyles, lithe bodies, and slightly bell-bottomed pants. Bengalis here are the labor equivalent of Mexicans back home. My guess is that their pay ranges somewhere between $2 and $3 a day for 12 hours of backbreaking labor, building houses for affluent Bhutanese in the most unmechanized way imaginable in 2009.

Every morning I think, "Why am I tying a tie around my white neck and these guys are carrying cloth bags of wet concrete to and fro from 7am to 10pm everyday? The inequality and seeming randomness of who gets what in life - because I am some genetic outcome of two Americans rather than two people from Cooch Behar -- is inescapable. This awareness is nothing new -- in fact, it's totally cliche - what do you do with it? The point is, it haunts me like a sinister shadow...always there. Just walking here this morning, I walked by a guy carrying empty bottles to sell for maybe $1 . Over my shoulder, I carried my $2,000 Apple computer. Every day. Maybe I am thinking about this more than usual because of a more shocking than normal discovery yesterday.

As readers know, I am working on a rural development initiative. I finally saw some raw data yesterday. All of these villages -- like so many here -- are not on the road system. Most of the 10 we are working with are 2-4 days walk from the road. 4 days?!! With washed out bridges, flooded rivers, leeches along the way. Their income? As low as 17 US cents per day per capita. I mean, c'mon? Are you kidding me? A family of 7 that earns US$80 a year? Another family that earns 60 US cents in a month cash....this is subsistence at the most vulnerable level possible. Regardless of how far they support their needs outside of the cash economy, one shock -- a drought, a flood, a wild boar attacking the crops - and off the edge you go.

How did we get here? Where I have relatively boundless resources while young Indian men toil away, away from home and family, for pennies an hour? Although I wish I could just spread billions around personally, I'll never have enough money to just support everyone...so when I get caught up in the technical aspects of looking at program systems and impact assessments, I sometimes think...."you know what, this is just a matter of will. It's a matter of human generosity, of making the right choices in homes and in policy in the North." I think, "we can land someone on the moon (and pay billions to fix a toilet on the space station) and we can't get oral rehydration salts to villages in India."

And, that's it...that's why I believe in GNH - whether it gets successfully operationalized or not it promotes an important worldview. Because development and alleviation of suffering isn't primarily a function of technical development practices. It's about our commitment to each other as one collective humanity. Our abandonment of self in favor of our oneness. I don't know how it's going to happen but unless our consciousness gets lifted, we won't escape this -- and we certainly won't escape its active production.

As sure as the sun will rise, on Monday I will wake up, look out the window again, and wonder why I am not there hauling concrete. And, after all my travels, I sometimes think -- what the hell do you know about all these lives your eyes only glimpse? I just don't know what I don't know about what's messed up about my lot.

Project Eliminate Extreme Poverty

This past year, I suffered through a hideous, grotesque haunted house of math equations. I said to myself, "Well, it will all be worth it when you go to Bhutan and work on program evaluation." Umm. Since I have been here, I haven't seen a number let alone a withering blob of Greek letters. The newly established Research and Evaluation Division is still working in a wholly qualitative sense. That will change but for now I've packed away my econometrics books and set forth on another work plan. Sorry, STATA, I know you will miss me, but I will be back and hugging your greenness in September.

So, what am I doing? I've zeroed in on this ambitious, exciting undertaking of the Royal Government called the Rural Economic Advancement Programme (REAP). It seeks to create Village Development Plans for the 300 materially poorest villages in Bhutan. Each plan will be an integrated set of specific interventions aimed at improving rural livelihoods. What needs the most work are the systems....

Creating an appropriate methodology for village selection and prioritization. Developing the right baseline surveys. Developing the criteria for and choosing the treatment and control villages. Building the framework for data analysis and development of the Village Development Plan. Developing the planning capacity of local authorities. And, finally setting up the evaluation methodology. And, I am going to tackle all of this in these 11 weeks. Of course, I won't complete any of the systems. But, I do know that I will advance them in such a way as to lay an essential foundation for various stages of the REAP. It is such an exciting thing -- to eliminate extreme poverty from this country by 2014. It's a matter of about 5,000 households. It can be done...but it requires organization. Strong management, work plans, consistent, organized systems...this is what needs to be strengthened. So, as one of my professors said, it's not about getting the technical right...it's about getting the right management and organization in place. So, I am not using the quantitative tools I suffered to develop but I am working on what may be even more important. I am very happy with this endeavor - I only wish I could stick around longer to work on it. And, I feel like I am honoring Right Livelihood in this project. Thanks, universe!

Destination: Happiness?

Beyond the challenge of benevolent social planning lies the challenge of getting everyone on board. One of the issues that wrinkles my forehead most is trying to understand who is committed to GNH here and how much. Needless to say, Bhutan is no more monolithic in its ideologies and vision than is the United States. Those whose spirit and mind are deeply rooted in their Buddhist faith are also those who are most focused on GNH. But a lot of powerful individuals here love their Land Cruisers, drivers, and maids. They see an economy where everything is possible and they are in the position to reap the most benefit if it opens up wide to unbridled growth. So, you have strange rationalizations happening: an extraordinarily expensive consulting contract (with worthless you-know-who) to accelerate growth (mind you, this economy grows at a Chinesey clip of 8-9% annually). You have one of the GNH strategies being the relaxation of architectural restrictions (because it inhibits start-ups and growth -- see growth rate above.) And, most disconcerting of all, you get a strong push for accession to the WTO. Not because of its economic merits but because it is a threat-reducing, fear-allaying official recognition from one more international institution.

So, what do you have? Contestation for the future of Bhutan. I worry. Eyes wide open, I place hope in Bhutan to share with the world an alternative. Placing humanity, generosity, community, culture, and the environment at the center of our collective future. But, like I said in an earlier post, the shiny and the glittery are seductive. It's a tussle between the material and the spirit and one side doesn't have to fall in the mud. It's a matter of finding common ground and negotiating some balance in development but it's usually the case that the Land Cruisers blow by those walking at 100km -- and that's what has me concerned.

Phajoding

The road doesn't go up the mountain much further past my house. A few more bends and you gate to the Royal Gate. Past this, I am not allowed. The ravine that follows is the domain of the four Queens -- all sisters -- wives of the Fourth Druk Gyalpo. The mountains above are accessible from another path. The path goes along the ridge up the mountain to a series of monasteries 4,000 feet higher -- in the clouds most of the time.

As you start the hike at the Bhutan Broadcasting System Tower, you are met by tens of thousands of prayer flags. It's like 1,000 carnivals all at once all dedicated to making blessings for all sentient beings. Prayer flags are always massed at strategic points where the wind can carry the prayers from the passes to the rivers where they get carried far and wide by the water.

After a couple of hours, you come to a small monastery with one caretaker monk. It was built in 1345 and has a beautiful temple inside where I said my prayers. Two hours later, you get to Phajoding - a set of beautiful monasteries. Since it was Para-Nirvana, each had a puja (ritual) going on with chanting and horn-blowing. Next to the main monastery is a sacred pond. All the lakes and ponds here are sacred and it is forbidden to swim in them or disturb them in any way. More on this later.

In one of the monasteries is a dragon's egg. A large round stone that has been there for several hundred years -- and yes, it is believed to be a dragon's egg. As you look up, you see one more monastery another thousand feet higher perched on the cliff just under the top ridge. We made this hike - another hour - in the mist. When we arrived, we made offerings to the monks and entered an incense smoke-filled room with women and men chanting at their own rhythm and rotating their prayer beads. We made prayers and then went outside to have butter tea and biscuits. Filled out water bottles with cold holy water from three different springs, spun the prayer wheels in the chortens, and began our descent.

Had we gone further - and climbed over the ridge, we would have come to an active aerial buiral ground. This is where some families bring deceased children. When the child dies, they carry the body all the way up the mountain, wrapped in cloth and leave it there for the birds and animals to eat. Sometimes, they dismember the body first. It is hard to imagine how families have the courage and faith to do this - the purpose is to not waste anything -- to make sure the body becomes of use to other sentient beings - to provide nourishment for them.

Another hour later, in leopard territory, and nearly always cloaked in mist and fog, is one of the larger sacred lakes surrounded by rhododendron. I have yet to visit this lake but there is a haunting story that comes from there. A few years ago, some boys went there and threw rocks in the lake, a sign of disrespect. The clouds and rain rolled in immediately and they got lost for a month in the forests. 4 of the 6 boys died and the other two emerged emaciated in an entirely different valley.

You cannot mountaineer here. The mountains are the homes of deities as are the lakes. Nature here is imbibed with spirits and it is no wonder why when you see the clouds form, change and move like ghostly apparitions. The Himalayas definitely feel like another realm. I extended my trip here by one week yesterday so that I could spend some trekking the realm of these spirits.

Spiderman and The Gho

I could have chosen any incongruity. But, I love kids -- so I chose this one. The other day I saw this kid dressed up in his gho -- the traditional dress for men here (just google image it)...it's really really cool. He was on the back of his dad's motorcycle with his overladen Spiderman backpack. And, that's Thimphu. Take one thing from the West and one thing from Bhutan and throw them together. More than most places I have been, Thimphu straddles different worlds at every step -- and more than most places I have been, does so in a way that feels harmonious.

Young people aren't running away from their culture. They love their culture and know that it is something special. They are just creating hybridity. Take this one: The other day, I climbed the mountains behind Thimphu (next post.) On the way, these kids befriended me -- by kids, I mean 20ish. (Sigh.) One of them was just great...Tashi the LA thug. He had some innovative do-rag on and always had his hands ready to go into some rap song posture...straight up Cali Asian thug look. But. He and his friends were climbing the mountain on Para-Nirvana, the day the Buddha passed from the Earth, to pay reverence and make offerings in the monasteries. Never once did they pass a cairn or Chorten on the right and when they entered the monasteries, the put on their ghos, offered ghee and incense, and prostrated three times. So, in the words of a good friend...it is their Look. Behind the look, Bhutan's right there. Smiles are never far away here and t-shirts advertise that they don't cost anything.

I got this text message from one of the guys -- Pema Dorji (translation: Lotus Flower Thunderbolt)....what does your name mean? Decision: if I have a kid, they get a kickass Bhutanese name like that. Pema sent me this message: "Hey, Mr. Thomas, Everytin fine, Touch ur heart, close ur eyes, make a wish, say gudnite, sky so wide,, stars so bright, off the light,, n sleep tight." Hmm. I don't get a message like that from a brand new friend every day. Especially one that likes girls. This place is very very cool. I hope they know that.