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By Root 480 0

in together. They get divorced by moving out. There is no stigma attached to divorce or having children out of wedlock. “Now, out in eastern Bhutan,” she tells us, “you may hear the term night-hunting. This refers to the practice of sneaking into a girl’s house at night, which is a lot more difficult than you would imagine, considering that in most houses, the whole family sleeps in one room. Generally, the idea is, if you’re still there in the morning, you’re married.” We all laugh. She goes on. “You’ll find that if you do have a relationship with a Bhutanese, the village will be quite accepting of the whole thing. Just remember, they say there are no secrets in Bhutan, especially in eastern Bhutan, so you can expect everyone to know about it by the next day.”

She clears her throat. “Just don’t have a relationship with any of your students,” she says, looking straight at me. I glance around—no, she is definitely looking at me. I raise my eyebrows at her. “Are you the young lady going to the college?” she asks.

“No, I’m going to Pema Gatshel. Grade two, ” I answer indignantly, thinking, well, now I know the whole story there. Too young indeed! The Jesuit principal thought I’d run off with a student.

We move on to other concerns. If you fall seriously ill, go to the nearest hospital. If there’s no hospital, go to a basic health unit. Send a wireless message to your field director. There are stories about teachers who had to be carried down mountains on makeshift stretchers by their students. Our field director says they’ve been fairly lucky, though; they’ve had very few emergency evacuations. He reminds us what is meant by emergency evacuation: getting down from your village to a road, finding a vehicle, making the two- or three-day journey back to Thimphu. Someone asks, “So basically, if my appendix bursts out there in Tashi Yangtse, I’m a goner?”

“Well, yes,” our field director says, and smiles apologetically. “Sorry, but it’s not like you can call a helicopter.” Everyone nods. Of course you can’t.

I do not ask about those little yellow dial-a-copter cards that WUSC gave us in Canada with a phone number for medical evacuation. I carry mine with me, tucked into my passport. I seem to be the only one who actually believed I could call 1-800-GET-ME-OUT.

The other teachers, many of whom have taught in other developing countries, do not seem the least bit alarmed. Quite the contrary, they are having a wonderful time. Everything is funny to them. The power blackouts, the icy hotel rooms, the coxcomb in someone’s chicken curry. They call the orientation itself “disorientation,” the health session is dubbed “From Scabies to Rabies.” The stinking local bus is the “Vomit Comet,” the dubious-looking dumplings we eat at lunch are “Dysentery Danishes.” Instead of a copy of Where There Is No Doctor, they call for copies of “Where There Is No Body Shop.” They tell horror stories with glee. The man who loses all his bottom teeth after getting a simple filling. A woman with tapeworm cysts in her brain. Leeches in various orifices. A Canadian in Tashigang cracked up and was found running around the prayer wheel in the center of town, naked; he was taken out in handcuffs. Typhoid, paratyphoid, hepatitis A, B and C, TB, meningitis, Japanese encephalitis. They make up a little song. I try to join in but my laughter sounds loud and empty in my ears; I am steps away from a prolonged, hysterical outburst.

There are frequent power failures in the evening. We go to bed early, because it is too cold to do anything else, and there is nothing else to do anyway. I read my book of Buddhist teachings by candlelight. My first exposure to Buddhism came through Robert, who had practiced Zen meditation in his days as a musician. I had never been at ease in the Catholicism in which I had been raised; it left too many false notes and dead ends in my head. The basic teachings of Buddhism stretch and trouble me, but they also ring clear and true. According to my book, this is the first of four degrees of faith: a feeling of mental clarity when hearing