Radio Shangri-La_ What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth - Lisa Napoli [99]
While we wait for his arrival, I fill the time by stopping by Kuzoo; Radio Jockey Kinzang loves having guest hosts with foreign accents, and by now the listening audience has heard me yap on the air on many occasions over the past two years. I also find myself enjoying long lunches with friends, where other friends happen by and hours elapse, filled with meandering conversation. Thimphu is changing, but the rhythm of life here for me is still a delight.
One afternoon my dining companion is Phuntsho, a woman about my age who is divorced with three children, two studying in India and one at the Bhutan on the Border, the University of Texas at El Paso. We are discussing how, in the second half of our lives, we want to change professions. Phuntsho says she’s thinking about becoming a nurse. I reveal my recent, very peculiar recurring dream.
“It is a gigantic room, filled with babies. There is a long line of bassinets, all in a row. It is up to me to take care of all of them, just me. And I work my way down the line, pick up each baby, and kiss him on the head. And all of a sudden they are all cooing and crying, and I am falling asleep.…”
Phuntsho smiles slyly. She knows how outrageous a fantasy this is, and I do, too. I take this dream as a sign of my morphing ambitions, to figure out how to help children who have no one else.
To do this in Bhutan would be impossible; there are no orphanages here. There isn’t even a formal adoption policy. The maternity nurse at the hospital keeps a list of prospective parents, and calls them when a mother wants to give up her child. There just aren’t that many unwanted babies, Phuntsho says. After spending time here, I wonder if this is denial speaking, or a matter of resources and culture.
Close to 40 percent of the population is under fourteen years old. And a growing problem is that kids born “without fathers” are lost in the system. Without proof of both parents’ citizenship, the child is forever in limbo, denied the rights of a full-fledged Bhutanese—meaning, most notably, that the child can’t enroll in school. Many of these children—no one knows just how many there are—are the result of a long-standing village ritual called “night hunting,” where a man crawls through a window into a woman’s bedroom and sleeps with her. When I first heard about the custom, I was startled by its similarity to my own experience. Only now is anyone in Bhutan openly beginning to call this rape, but it happens with enough frequency that the parliament has been grappling with a law to ban it.
When a “fatherless” baby was born on the farm in the days before modernization, the additional hands were welcome; but as subsistence farming becomes less common, a whole new class of children is growing up who have no prospects for the future. One of the four queens of the fourth king has been an active proponent of family planning, but it’s believed that only 30 percent of Bhutanese use birth control. Among young Bhutanese, the issues are becoming the same as anyplace else: a growing demand for the morning-after pill, available over the counter for a little over $1.50; a spate of botched abortions in clinics across the southern border in India; paternity tests to determine the father of the child. The ways of the Western world encroach.
Like it or not, perhaps an orphanage in Bhutan is inevitable.
The day after we share this discussion, Phuntsho calls me on the phone.
“Actually, I thought about it and there is something here that is close to an orphanage, where they could really use your help. You will find it interesting,” she says. “We leave tomorrow at ten a.m. Prepare to fall in love.”
She picks me up near the traffic circle in the center of town, and we make the trek toward Paro on the upgraded highway. After an hour or so of driving from city to city, we turn