It's Only Strange If You're a Stranger

I was five minutes late to third period. Five minutes, leaving 37 seventeen and eighteen year-olds alone in a classroom. In my absence all of the students had decided to take advantage of their newfound freedom. Without the teacher there, they could catch up on an activity that they get little time for.

You can imagine.

When I entered, there they were, all of them, not a single one free of guilt as they collectively engaged in …

… daily meditation.

The students were all sitting silently, backs erect, hands folded on their laps, breathing deeply. It even took a second for them to realize I was in the room. When they did, they arose, smiled and in unison said, “Good morning, sir.”

Yes, things are very different here.

As much as I find commonalities between me, my students and my colleagues, there are still many instances that mark how different an American upbringing is from a Bhutanese one. Mr. Yonten, who I take walks with frequently, told me about how he was raised in a village that had no roads or electricity. Many of the other kids did not own shoes so they ran around barefoot through stinging nettles and rocky terrain. His is an existence that seems so far in the past but Mr. Yonten is 30 years-old, younger than me. This undeveloped Bhutan was still the norm in the 1980s and 90s. He remembers the first time he saw a TV and the first time lightbulbs lit the rooms of his childhood home. He recalls the memories as if he were a witness to miracles.

Now Mr. Yonten has adapted to a modern Bhutan. He shares movies with me from his thumbdrive. He wears AC/DC t-shirts and we talk of climate change, the election in the US, and further development around his home. He lives under a giant cellphone tower.

Mr. Yonten’s personal adaptation to the modern world isn’t necessarily ubiquitous. The other day at a house warming party I talked to Mr. Gyeltshen about traffic lights.

“They’re in the cities, right?” he asked.

“They’re everywhere—cities, suburbs, even the smallest towns will at least have one.”

“In Bhutan we do not even have one,” he told me. I couldn't tell whether he said it with disappointment or pride. “Not even in Thimphu.”

He asked me to explain how they work. “What do the colors mean?”

There is a risk of thinking that a culture is simple with questions such as these. But I’ve asked Mr. Gyeltshen myriad questions since arriving here that I’m sure paint me as the ignorant one. How do you hand wash your clothes? How much should I pay for a new gho? How do I buy meat in the market? When does the rainy season begin?

Being knowledgeable is a relative concept.

Some of my knowledge is completely pointless. I explained to a student that in the US we have grocery stores the size of the school’s soccer field. I went into detail about how they are filled with dozens of each kind of food. When he asked, “Why do you need so many options for potato chips?” I had no answer. Sometimes we can’t even find garlic here in town. I haven’t seen any kind of fruit in nearly two weeks.

A story that my class XII students were reading included the phrase “made from scratch,” which I found myself bumbling around for a relatable definition.

“It means food that you make from the most basic ingredients.”

They looked at me quizzically.

“Foods that aren’t premade like frozen dinners. Or fast food.”

Again, complete perplexity. It’s remarkable to have a refrigerator here (and basically futile, since the power goes out almost every day,) let alone a freezer to put Hungry Man dinners in (if you could find such a thing.) The only thing considered “fast food” are dumplings that are, in fact, made from scratch. So there went that definition.

I gave it another attempt, explaining to the students, “Pretty much everything you guys eat is ‘made from scratch.’”

An astute student responded, “Don’t you just call that ‘food’ then, sir?”

“Yes,” I said, a little annoyed. “I guess you do. Basically, we have a lot of options in America that aren’t made from scratch. So, I guess you could say, we have a lot of foods that aren’t food.”

Still, on their vocabulary test they memorized the definition and most of the students could define the term, though I’m sure the concept itself remains elusive.

There are other things too: Lopen—which means teacher in Dzongkha and is often a title reserved for those who teach the national language—enters the teachers work room every morning chanting Buddhist prayers. None of the other teachers complain; the sound is as natural as the birds chirping outside. His deep, guttural voice reverberates through the room.

When I see students in town they still bow and say, “Good afternoon, sir.” They scramble to find chairs for me to sit in when there is a sporting event outside and they bring me tea and crackers as I enjoy the games.

In class the students still look up at me as if shocked that there is a foreigner teaching them. I’ve been teaching here nearly three months now and still I get stares and reactions of surprise. For many, I’m the only foreigner they have ever spoken to.

Time is stretchable in Bhutan. A “short” meeting can go for an hour, plans to meet at 6:30 come to fruition closer to 7:30 or 8, class periods are fifty minutes long, but start late and go into the next teacher’s time (no worries, since that teacher is likely to start late too.) I diligently prepared my year syllabus in order to make sure I could cover all the material before the students’ board exams. It was perfect. But weekly there are sudden presentations, athletic meets, or pujas to bless the houses, schools, people. Each event eats away at my original pacing. I’m worried, as are the other teachers. Still there are some that tell me, “Don’t worry if you can’t finish everything. It doesn’t matter. Most years teachers can’t get through the syllabus.”

There are so many other things that I am now getting used to, but if I stop and think about them, I realize they are sensations I would have never experienced any other place in the world: the smell of a classroom of villager students, the trip to the tailor who is sewing my handmade gho, the sound of drums and Tibetan trumpets as a holy Lama utters ancient mantras to ward off evil spirits. The other day I drank blessed wine out of a human skull.

It’s a strange land. Or rather, I am strange and I must live and survive in this version of normal. I’ve done this before but the idea is still hard for me to reconcile. To truly live abroad is to give up some of your culture and identity, permanently. You must willingly let go of the past you and accept a new one who is not better, nor worse, but vastly different. Perhaps after I leave Bhutan I will be less punctual, more superstitious, and have an appetite for spicy chilies. I might want to spend more days just sitting in the grass and chatting with friends, or wonder why a house needs anything more than a bed, a two burner stove, a squat toilet and a sink. Who knows? It’s impossible to predict these changes. All I know is that a piece of me, however big or small, will be Bhutanese. If not, than I never truly lived here and I didn’t learn a damn thing. 

Teenagers, Prejudices, and American Politics – A Meandering Essay

My class of 46 students, one of five classes with more than 35, has finished their personal narratives. The stories are diligently hand written, both the rough and final drafts. Word processing and printing have yet to catch on; paper and ink are limited and the few computers that are on campus are not sufficient for a whole class, especially one the size of mine. So when it is time to turn in their work the students hand in their English notebooks in lieu of a nicely printed story on one or two pieces of paper. Now towers of notebooks sit in my Boy’s Sick Room like ancient ruins on the verge of collapse. They’re filled with stories of loss, hardships endured and joyous childhood memories. The majority, though, are love stories.

Teenagers.

Many students are as deeply in love as Bhutan is remote. They relish any chance they can get to express their ungainly, virginal passions. I’ll read final drafts for days, combing through sentences like:

She have the beautifulest sexiest eyes and her hair is most softest and smelling of flowers in a summer sunshine.

And:

His body is the most perfect. He is muscled perfectly and his smile is also perfect. He wears jeans and a white t-shirt with a leather jacket, dressing cool and perfect.

I already taught the class subject-verb agreement in the present tense, how to use quantifiers correctly, and that they should vary their adjectives. Those lessons, apparently, haven’t stuck.

What has stuck is another sentence, an example of slang that I taught knowing that the students would find it relevant. “When you’re this in love with a person, we say ‘You’ve got it bad,’” I explain. They memorized the phrase quickly, albeit not quite accurately. I heard them exchange it with their peers while sharing their rough drafts.

You got it bad.

“Ah Pema, you has got it very, very bad man.”

“Yes, I have it for the girl very much bad!”

Their slang is a work in progress. Perhaps at the end of the year they’ll sound just like Americans, much to the dismay of the rest of the English speaking world.

Sometimes the students’ mistakes produce incredibly poetic language that they themselves are unaware of. One student wrote in his story,

When she looked at me my heart grew with a million smiles.

Another student, unable to find the exact verb for his sentence, threw together this ad hoc description that I enjoy even more than if he had used the ‘correct’ verb:

Every day the couple was mouth fighting with each other.

It’s a tough task grading this many essays. What gets me through are the moments where I burst out laughing at these stumbles into humorous language, or other moments where I find myself reflecting on sentences that are accidentally poignant.

I’m also often surprised by just how similar these Bhutanese kids are to all the teenagers I’ve worked with in the last decade. One of my students is from a family of semi-nomadic yak herders who still practice polyandry. He lives near an area that locals believe is the natural habitat of the migoi, or as we know it, the yeti. His story had an opening that teenagers and adults—myself included—have no problem relating to:

I confessed, “I love you!” She replied, “Let’s be friends.”

Another student, also from a small village but one where smartphones and 3G have become available, wrote:  

I sent him a Facebook message and he is not replying. I am waiting all day for reply, but nothing. I am the most saddest I have ever been in my life.

It’s good to see the students suffer in this beautiful way. It takes me back to the same lovelorn confusion that consumed me in those high school days, a torture that is universal among the pubescent. Their hopeless pining and veritably apocalyptic heartache are evidence of just how alike all of us are, especially as teenagers. Shylock’s plea in The Merchant of Venice, “If you prick us, do we not bleed,” could just as easily be, “If you don’t reply to our Facebook messages, do we not feel the most saddest?” I’ve traveled half-way around the world and into “the last Shangri-La” to arrive back in a classroom where kids talk about the frustrations of Facebook chatting.

There’s WWF on TV here, and BBC, and movie channels if you have cable. One student, a kid with thick glasses and a good smattering of acne, exclaimed in the middle of group work, “Don’t you ever touch a black man’s radio!” Had it not been for the gho and knee high socks, the ochre skin, the thick Dzongkha accent, the Himalayan foothills behind him, the fact that he’s five foot five and has an emerging Elvis Presley haircut, I’d have thought that the remark was said by Chris Tucker himself.

Another cross-cultural similarity: an affinity for hip-hop. 

It’s good to live abroad. Through my experiences I’ve been able to understand a tired, old platitude viscerally: No matter how different someone seems than us, we’re all very much the same. It isn’t much of an epiphany, is it? I guess you’d probably expect more from someone immersed in such an isolated country. Did I really go this far to arrive at the conclusion that humans are all alike? Psshhht, tell me something I didn’t know.

I think living the truth of that idea of sameness is different than understanding it on a theoretical level. Sure, we’d all like to say we know the humanity of our neighbor, but how often do we get to live in his home, spend time in his village, listen and reflect on his philosophies, read his journal? For me it’s a necessary practice that’s worth diligent repeating. There is, after all, a real risk of forgetting the similarities that we share with the other 7.4 billion people riding this rock.

As I watch the unfolding of a presidential election back home and see hate spewed from both sides it’s difficult to believe that many people actually understand this concept of sameness to the point where they stop and let empathy soak in. It’s not just in American politics either, of course. With news of bombings in Brussels and Lahore, of refugees turned away, of young black men killed by cops, and hate crimes against the LGBTQ community, one can’t help thinking that the world is not made up of billions of people that share similar experiences, but rather there are two factions that are forever different: us and them.

What I like about working with teenagers—both abroad and back home—is that even though they too can be some of the most judgmental people around, their prejudices have yet to solidify. There is always a chance that a week of group work, a history lesson, sometimes even a single poem, can jar a student toward a more empathetic future. There is still hope for the next generation, bundles of it. By working with my students I’m reminded daily that we are all in some stage of our lives that allows for reinventing. And I’m reminded that the pain that I have suffered—be it from love, loss, a stupid decision, or broken trust—chances are that the person across the room from me has suffered that same pain too, along with the villager milking her cow, the college student buying dumplings in the market, the kid in the hoodie, the quiet, bookish student alone in the library, and the old lady circumambulating the prayer wheel. If such similarities exist between my aberrantly tall, pale-faced, blue-eyed, hiking boot wearing 32 year-old self and the 17 and 18 year old Himalayan village kids here, then I’m willing to bet that neighbors in the same country or from countries right next door to one another probably share the same similarities too.

There’s only one way to find out though. You’ll have to sit down with them, listen to their stories, and offer some of your own. Without doing that you’ll forever be thousands of miles away from them, even if you're right next door.