Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [2]
You must leave your home and go forth from your country.
The children of Buddha all practice this way.
—The Thirty-Seven Bodhisattva Practices
Arrival
Teachers will find
themselves in
isolated settlements
in an isolated
country. Living
conditions may vary
from basic
to spartan.
The demands on
their personal
resources and
professional abilities
will be high.
—WUSCBriefing Kit for Bhutan
A Remote Posting
The doors of the Paro airport are thrown open to the winds. The little building and its single stripe of tarmac are set in the middle of dun-colored fields dotted with mounds of manure. The fields are carved into undulating terraces edged with sun-bleached grass; intricate footpaths lead to large houses, white with dark wooden trim. A young girl in an ankle-length orange-and-yellow dress, two horses, three cows, a crow in a leafless willow tree. An ice-blue river splashing over smooth white stones. A wooden cantilever bridge. Above the bridge, on a promontory, a massive fortress, its thick white walls tapering toward the top, a golden spire flashing on the dark red roof.
All around, the mountains rise and rise, pale gold and brown in the February light. At one end of the valley, beyond a wall of black, broken peaks, one white summit shimmers; at the other end, the mountains grow tamer, softly rounded and turning smoky blue in the distance. On the slopes I can see clusters of prayer flags, long narrow strips of white cloth raised on towering poles, floating in the wind.
This is what I flew into, leaving behind the cities of India sprawling over hazy plains. At first, the mountains were far below, plunging into narrow valleys thick with forest, dense, impenetrable. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the pilot said, “we have now begun our descent into Paro, ” and the little plane dropped suddenly, leaving me gasping as we skimmed over ridges and dropped again, into one of the few valleys in Bhutan wide and flat enough to land a plane in.
The sun slips into the crevasse between two hills and the afternoon is over. The line at the visa counter moves slowly. I am the last one at the desk. The visa officer carefully inspects and then stamps my passport. My bags are lying alone on the tarmac outside, beneath furiously snapping flags. I haul them in. I have arrived.
On the shelf above the desk in my one-room apartment overlooking a strip mall in the northern suburbs of Toronto, there were two blue plastic trays, one filled with graduate-school application forms, and the other marked simply “other.” In the “other” pile was an article entitled “Working Your Way Around Europe,” a yellowing passport application form, and a newspaper ad: TEACHERS WANTED FOR OVERSEAS POSTS. It was 1988, I was twenty-three. Outside my one window, winter was melting into sludge. The ad announced positions in southern Africa and central America, but the one that caught my attention was for an English lecturer at a college in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Two years of teaching and overseas experience were required for the position. I had neither, but I showed the ad to my boyfriend, Robert, who had once been to South America on an international development seminar. “Don’t you think it would be a great experience?” I asked.
“It does look good on a résumé,” he said. But I hadn’t meant that kind of experience. I wanted something outside of professional considerations and career connections, something that wouldn’t fit on a CV Robert and I had decided to get married but that would be several years in the future, when we were both finished with our studies. I was supposed to be starting a Ph.D. in English. But I kept wondering if I should do something else altogether. I want to do something in the real world, I kept saying