As the school week began again, so too did our rigorous
schedule as we visited Pelkhill Higher Secondary School, which marked our first
opportunity to interact with students of the same grade level as us (grade
11/12). Still, our day did not begin with prayer the way it had with
every other school we visited. Instead, we had the opportunity to attend
International Youth Day alongside many government officials (including the
education minister himself) and students of various ages. This program, which
is funded by Unicef, calls for the youth around the world to voice their
opinion about a variety of issues that directly concern them. Today, this
revolved around a discussion of the very relevant issue of youth migration. The
various students and officials who discussed this issue did so in context with
the rising tendency of the Bhutanese youth to migrate form rural Bhutan to the
more modernized urban capital city of Thimphu. This trend has amplified the
still unresolved issues of unemployment and crime in Bhutan as this increase in
population has resulted in a large body of disgruntled, unemployed, and
uneducated teens and early adults. Beyond this, issues of drugs, alcoholism,
and gang violence have surfaced as a direct result of this movement. Solutions
to these problems were discussed in an open discussion with Bhutanese officials
(including the mayor of Thimphu) and the many Bhutanese students who sat
alertly in the audience. The most common argument was that resources needed to
be more equally distributed throughout Bhutan so that the rural Bhutanese youth
could actually receive a quality education and have adequate resources and
therefore not feel the need to migrate to Thimphu to have these standards.
Beyond this, Thimphu, in ironic contrast to the rest of Bhutan, does not have
any boarding schools. As a result, students who wish to study in Thimphu are
actually forced to live there. We were all extremely interested in this
discussion and were left with many questions about what the proper solution to
this issue was. While we had no doubt that a better distribution of resources
would be helpful in limiting youth migration, some of us felt that there would
always be an incurable inclination among teens and young adults to travel to
the more lively urban centers of a country. This debate could not have come at
a better time as, shortly after the end of this event, we traveled to Pelkhill
School, a place with a history of relatively poor education standards and teen
violence and substance abuse. Even as we entered the school, we were greeted by
a student with eyes that glowed red under obvious intoxication and as we walked
through the halls of the school, it became quite clear that we were witnessing
yet another Bhutanese perspective. In the classroom itself, it seemed that the
general academic disinterest the students exhibited was met with a proportional
level of frustration, laziness, and mediocrity by the teachers. We soon learned
about the gangs that could be found throughout Thimphu, which came as a
surprise to us considering the almost unbalancing level of kindness and
generosity that we were met with. Even the students who openly admitted to
involving themselves in such activities were very a pleasure to talk with and
were, somewhat paradoxically, some of the nicest students we had met up to this
point. The question for us then became: how do these students become involved
in crime and where is Bhutanese culture in all of it? This is a question that
we will be exploring tomorrow, during our first full day at Pelkhill.
