Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [65]
Everything is more meaningful because it is connected to the earth. There are no signs to read, no billboards or neon messages; instead I read the hills and the fields and the farmhouses and the sky. The houses, made of mud and stone and wood, are not hermetically sealed. The wind blows in through the cracks, the night seeps in through the rough wooden window slats. The line between inside and outside is not so clear.
Everything is more meaningful because understanding requires struggle. I have to hold on to all the half-explained, half-translated, half-imaginable things, hoping that I will meet someone someday who will be able to explain. One evening I am called to the boys’ hostel to see a sick class VIII boy. He is sitting slumped in his bunk, eyes unseeing. When I touch his arm lightly, he shudders. The other boys explain: he has these fits, no not epilepsy, they know epilepsy, it is not that. It is like possession, they say. Last year a lama gave him a protective amulet and he was fine until he lost the amulet washing in the river last week and now, just see, miss, he is sick again. I don’t know what to say. They didn’t cover possession in the health course. Keep him warm, I say, but not too warm. Let him be but stay close by. Later, when I tell the other teachers, they nod. Yes, this happens. They don’t know how to say it in English. There are things here too old to be translated into this new language.
The headmaster asks me to teach class VIII English in the afternoons while class II C is learning Dzongkha. I stay up late the night before my first class, reviewing the lesson, hoping that I will be able to handle the senior students, many of whom are at least eighteen. I do not have to worry: they are well-behaved and meticulously polite. They are eager to answer questions with definite answers: What is the past participle of eat? What happens to the main character of the story? Other questions, though, produce a strained, confused silence. Perhaps they are shy, I think, perhaps they will express themselves more freely in their written assignments. But I am disappointed and puzzled by the sameness of their writing. Every piece begins with a cliché or a mangled proverb. As they say, student life is golden life, and it is true also. As saying goes, the cleanliness is next to the godliness and I agree to it. Every piece concludes with some hackneyed piece of advice or fawning praise (so let us ever thank our kind teachers who make so many sacrifices for the poor and undeserving students). I cannot get them to write in their own voices, and wonder if it is because individual expression is not valued here as it would be in the West. Originality seems to count for very little; the community is more important, conformity and accordance and compliance.
But there must be some dissent, I think. I listen more carefully outside the classroom, and begin to hear different stories. Some senior girls tell me they were forced to cut their hair at school. They are ethnically Nepali, from the southern districts of Bhutan. (According to government policy, students above class VI are sent to schools outside their home districts. Southern students are sent north, eastern students west, western students south, to promote greater integration.) The Nepali girls tell me that it is their custom to keep their hair long. “We wept like anything,” they say, “but what to do? Short hair is driglam namzha.”
I casually ask the headmaster why the female students must all have short hair. “Lice,” he says matter-of-factly. The hostels are alive with fleas, lice and bedbugs, this is true, and given the school’s erratic water supply,