Update: Day 4

Today, we devoted most of our time toward preparing for our trip to Tashindingkha Middle Secondary School in the rural village of Phunaka. Each of us have been working to develop a curriculum based off of a specific topic and we hope that we will be able to effectively cover a wide range of topics within our ten days at the school. Prior to our trip to Bhutan, we organized fundraising events to help purchase books for donation. Today, we divided about 65 books into separate boxes that will each be given to one of the various schools that we will be visiting. Still, the whole concept of teaching in rural Bhutan is a big point of uncertainty for us. Our goal is to strike the elusive balance between simplifying our concepts in order to compensate for the language barrier and actually getting across the idea that we have set out to promote. As we reach Phunaka and as we begin to work in classes, this blog will help to catalogue each topic that we discuss as well as what the student reaction was. Despite the workload, we found the time to leave the Royal Education Council building and travel around Thimphu. We had lunch at a restaurant called The Zone, an interesting and relatively expensive take on Western food with a unique version of everything from hamburgers (or yak burgers) to pizza. We ate with two Bhutanese college students who were both currently studying in the US and as a result offered a unique perspective to their home country. Although they began by describing the "beauty" of Bhutan and how the country has a certain charm to it, the conversation soon shifted to the gangs and alcoholic issues that have begun to spike as a direct result of recent economic turmoil. They described to us how certain areas within Thimphu have been marred by violence and how the religious monument "Buddha Point" (a giant has paradoxically become a haven for this type of behavior. In our minds, this stabs a hole in the legitimacy of the concept of Gross National Happiness within Bhutan and, more specifically, Thimphu. Last summer, I spent a significant amount of time in both the rural and urban (Thimphu) parts of Bhutan and, during that time, I could not help but notice the fundamental distinctions between these two styles of life in terms of patriotism and commitment to GNH and Buddhist principles. I think that our trip to the rural Phunaka comes at an interesting time as it may help us to more accurately understand what raw Bhutanese culture looks like, something that is still not entirely clear to us.