Background: Bhutan 2012 (The Beginning of the Exchange Program)

It was one year ago that I descended into the Valley of Paro on the “Drukair” plane for the first time, initiating my two-month adventure in the Kingdom of Bhutan. The monasteries and small houses that nested within the trees beneath me dashed away from my eyes like an assortment of still images encompassing the horizon. As the plane descended gracefully onto the ground, the colossal Eastern Himalayan Mountains seemed to rise endlessly above my head, shrinking my apparent size to that of an insect. As I stepped out of the plane, the yellow letters “Nation Celebrates the Royal Wedding” greeted me, confirming my immense distance from western civilization. I felt as though I had been inserted into an alternate fantasy universe as I gazed deep into my surroundings. Upon my departure from the only airport in the country, two members of the Royal Education Council (REC) greeted me dressed formally in their Ghos, which bare a striking resemblance to the robes of the Japanese Kimono. Together we traveled 40 miles, delayed by numerous “cow traffic” dilemmas, to the capital city of Thimphu. It was there where I was able to work as an intern for the REC and tag along to numerous meetings with political officials, after which I began to formulate an understanding of how Bhutanese people view the world around them as well as how the concept of Bhutan’s “Gross National Happiness” (GNH) is incorporated into society. The ideas behind GNH are based off Buddhist principles and emphasize a non-economic approach to measuring wealth. While many aspects of GNH are specific to Bhutan, the country feels that such a system of measuring wealth should be universally accepted. The task for me as an REC intern was to discover how this idea, which Bhutan strongly identifies itself with, is tangibly translated into Bhutanese society. To me, the natural environment to answer this question was one with students my own age. As a result, I began working as a teacher’s assistant in Tashidingkha Middle Secondary School in Phunaka as well Pelkhill and YHSS in Thimphu. During my time in these schools, I could not help but notice the intrinsic differences between the students in the urban and rural schools. In the city of Thimphu, the students were far more westernized (a direct result from more exposure to the internet) and were more critical of the society in which they lived than the rural students. Beyond this, they also were more aggressive and seemed to have a romanticized conception of America. This distinction was highlighted by differing perceptions of what GNH actually means. The urban students valued economic success with greater value while the rural students valued emotional happiness and quality of life greater. Effectively, there seemed to be two contradictory conceptions of GNH. This idea suggested that increased exposure to the outside world would actually help these varying views synchronize. Beyond this, I felt that increased contact with the western world would actually help prevent the Bhutanese students from developing irrational expectations. Appropriately, the idea of creating the first student exchange program between the US and Bhutan surfaced. Now, a year later, such a program has successfully been created through the REC. This summer, I will be traveling with five students from Weston High School in Connecticut to Bhutan on July 20. During this trip, which will last a month, we will be visiting historical landmarks, traveling the country, meeting political officials, and teaching culture, music, sports, art, politics, and technology in schools. This blog will act to highlight our experiences as well as provide us with an outlet to define GNH and determine to what scale Bhutan experiences it. We will update this blog everyday with posts in order to catalogue our day-to-day work. In addition we will be posting photos and videos to make our descriptions of the country feel more tangible. Bhutan is a very unique country with very unique ideas that has managed to maintain its cultural identity amidst a period of rapid modernization. We hope that this blog manages to capture this societal characteristic. After this one-month trip has ended, we will be directing all of our attention toward raising money to pay for the Bhutanese student’s trip to the US, a daunting challenge that is absolutely essential in order to create an effective student exchange program.

Pictures: Bhutan 2012

Pictures from my initial two month internship for the Royal Education Council in Bhutan during the summer of 2012.

Report: Gross National Happiness Exchange Program 2012

Below is a copy of the report I gave to the Royal Education Council of Bhutan in the summer of 2012. In it, I describe my first trip to Bhutan as well as what the goals of the Gross National Happiness Exchange Program are.

To the Royal Education Council

Hello, for those that I have not yet met, my name is Julian. I came to Bhutan as an Intern for the REC with the goal of creating an internship exchange program between the US and Bhutan. I was fortunate enough to be able to travel Bhutan and stay in different schools and so I would like to share with you my thoughts and reflections on this experience. At the very end I would be very happy to try to answer any specific question you may have.

Before this internship in Bhutan, I had only seen this type of geographical beauty in photographs and films that portrayed lands that seemed both intangibly foreign and belonging to some fictional fantasy universe. This is why when I flew narrowly through the mountains surrounding Paro, it felt as though I was on the inside of a dome screen and the mountains I saw in the distance were nothing more than still images. The large billboard, advertising the marriage of the king and queen that greeted me as I walked out of the Drukair Plane clarified that I was no longer in America. Having been in my hometown of Weston Connecticut only three days before my arrival, seeing the villages that lay nested in the valleys and mountains was a drastic, eye opening change from the more crowded and built up towns I am used to seeing back home. The United States of America is unusual in that it does not have a state sanctioned religion the way Bhutan does and the vast majority of the American people do not have exposure to this type of national identity. Weston is an example of a place that has many resources yet, like many other towns and cities in the US, seems to be isolated from much of the outside world. These same characteristics also appear to be prevalent in Bhutan as well, even in its more urban and modern capital, Thimphu. It was this perceived common theme of lack of exposure to the outside world that sparked the idea to build the basis of a student exchange program between Bhutan and the US. The first weekend was spent traveling all they the way to Buhntang and visiting monasteries and other amazing landmarks. It was this trip, which felt like it had been weeks long that brought the Bhutanese culture to life for me. Coming to Bhutan was my first time ever being in Asia so I had never seen what a Buddhist temple or monk looked like.  Here is a small sample of the many pictures we took on this trip…. After returning back to Thimphu, I was fortunate enough to be able to tag along to meetings with my father for the next few weeks, which gave me the incredible opportunity to meet political officials and teachers, learning about the concept of GNH, the Bhutanese political system, and what exactly an exchange program with Bhutan might consist of in the process. One observation I had regarding the politics in Bhutan is that all the politicians I had the pleasure to meet seemed to genuinely care about the Bhutanese people in a very passionate fashion that is often not found in western politics. Soon after my father left Bhutan I went to Tashdingkha Boarding School in Phunaka, which turned out to be a life changing experience. The school itself did not have much. All of the students I interviewed said that they did not like the food, classes or rooms they stayed in. When asked if they liked the school overall however, every student was quick to answer a very certain “yes”. At first I wondered why this was the case because the two answers seemed to contradict one another. In only a matter of days however, it was clear to me why these students thought the way they did. Tashidingkha had a certain unique charm to it, a certain type of unity or bond that the students seemed to share. It was unlike anything I had ever seen and in the single week I stayed there I found it very difficult to keep myself from being absorbed by their school and its students. In retrospect I do believe that the education program there did have its issues. Teachers in subjects such as history, English, and the sciences would have to teach material that was not always covered by their textbooks, as a result many the teachers simply guessed statistics or definitions because there was no way for them to look them up on the internet in a more remote place like Phunaka. Often these definitions would be incorrect, it is this experience that really helped me understand the educational value of the Internet and the importance of it to be more widely distributed throughout Bhutan. I also saw some of the negative effects of the Internet in my trip to Pelkhil School in Thimphu that would follow. Some of these students were so heavily influenced by western culture through the Internet that it seemed to compromise their fundamental Bhutanese values that I saw were so essential in Phunaka. In addition many of these students were more aggressive towards one another than in Tashidingkha and the education curriculum was also lacking despite much greater access to the Internet. After my brief stay in Pelkhil, I went to YHSS for a few days. Most of the students there seemed to closer resemble the type of people I had met in Phunaka more than the students in Pelkhil, which is something I had not expected because I thought that Thimphu was just characteristically different from the more rural parts of Bhutan. While this is partially true because Thimphu does seem to have more exposure to the cultures of the outside world than the rest of Bhutan, there were major educational quality disparities between the students in Pelkhil and YHSS. It was this realization that leads me to really appreciate the importance of education and believe that the quality of education in a school has a direct baring on how well behaved the school’s students are and how well they will be able to serve their country as a productive member of society. Tashidingkha was an exception to this because it was a closed boarding school that had almost no exposure to Thimphu and its evolving attitude, no less to western culture. The days I spent in these schools immensely helped me understand the possible benefits of having an exchange program with the US. As my time in Bhutan comes to a close for this summer, I feel that this exchange program has been more clearly defined and its goals more precise. As a first step in what I hope will be a multi town, multi state exchange program, five American high school level students from Weston Connecticut will come to Bhutan in late June and stay for a month, absorbing Bhutanese culture and spending times in the schools here. At the end of that month, ideally five Bhutanese high school level students will travel to the US with the five American students and they will stay there until late August. The benefit of beginning this exchange program in Weston is that I have a direct connection to Weston High School and the first selectman and we have already seen a large amount enthusiasm from many families there. Students who apply from Weston will have to be academically successful and exhibit a genuine interest in learning about and experiencing Bhutanese culture. On the other side, we plan to send students from different areas of Bhutan who are not only fluent in English, but also have a deep connection to their own culture and understand the principles of GNH. The ideas of GNH are of major interest to many people in the US because it is a very unique way of measuring wealth that does not rely entirely on economic growth. I feel that while the Bhutanese students who travel to the US will indefinitely learn more about the American people and understand the positives and the negatives of western culture, they may also learn more about themselves and how unique and still largely untouched their culture is. They may come back to Bhutan, having viewed America with their own eyes and not the tampered ones that popular media often lends, with a higher appreciation of their heritage and an even greater desire to preserve it. I truly feel that to a certain extent, the best way to prevent western influence from dismantling the culture of a country, like Bhutan, into a hollow shell is to actually expose its people to the west with a realistic and critical viewpoint. If I could give one word of advice to the peers I spent this last month with, it would be this. While the west has a lot to share, and this cannot be disregarded, I think it is very important for a country like Bhutan that its people have the ability to critically understand and filter what aspects of the west they choose to take in to their country and daily lives because the west also has immense social flaws and not everything is worth absorbing. I think education can be a way of mediating this influence.

Thank You