For your reading pleasure...an article that I wrote for Druk Air's Tashi Delek Magazine.
At the end of a long day in the classroom during my first month of teaching in Bhutan, I was walking home past the small group of local tshonkhangs (shops-cum-bars) that are clustered around my home. As I stopped to admire the sun dropping behind the mountains and to marvel at how clever I was for having landed myself in such an unspoilt, Himalayan paradise, I was surprised to hear what sounded like students’ voices coming from one of the shops.
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At the end of a long day in the classroom during my first month of teaching in Bhutan, I was walking home past the small group of local tshonkhangs (shops-cum-bars) that are clustered around my home. As I stopped to admire the sun dropping behind the mountains and to marvel at how clever I was for having landed myself in such an unspoilt, Himalayan paradise, I was surprised to hear what sounded like students’ voices coming from one of the shops.
“Whoa! John Cena!”
“Smack Down! Yeah!”
Sticking my head around the door, I
found four boys from the boarding hostel sitting on a makeshift wooden bench,
eyes glued to the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) blaring from the TV in
the corner of the room.
“Sir likes wrestling?!”
On the screen, a masked behemoth,
oiled nipples gleaming under his yellow mankini, launched his three hundred
pound frame onto the head of his huddled counterpart.
“WHAAAA!” The live audience and boys in the shop screamed, thumping
their hands on their thighs.
“John Cena is the best, sir!”
“Hmmm…”
“Sir not like wrestling?”
So much for disguising my
disapproval.
“Shouldn’t you all be in the
hostel?”
“Ah, err, ah…Don’t tell warden,
sir! Please, sir!”
“Isn’t it study time?”
“Sir, please! John Cena – so jigs sir!”
“Hmmm, last warning. If I see you in here again, no second chances!”
“Thank you, sir!” they chorused,
bowing and scraping their way out of the shop and back towards the hostel.
“Sir, fighting is real, sir?” they
asked as they walked away.
I shook my head in response (and
dismay) and headed back to my house. Hearing a noise, I turned back just in
time to see once of the cheekiest boys, Tenzin Dorji ‘B’, trying to sneak back
into the shop.
“HEY! I. SAID. GET. BACK. TO. THE.
HOSTEL!”
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| Students during morning meditation |
A week later, I was still turning
the incident over in my mind. Throughout most of that day, I’d been leaping
around my Class VII classroom miming, scribbling, handing out learning aids,
pronouncing long words like psychological
and impressionable very
s-l-o-w-l-y and c-l-e-a-r-l-y, in a desperate attempt to communicate at least
some of the ideas in Helena Norberg-Hodge’s article People from Mars to my mostly befuddled students.
In the article, the author, an established anthropologist, describes the effects of the first waves of tourism
and TV on the lives of the Tibetan Buddhist communities in Ladakh where she had
lived for a number of years. The text makes up part of the required readings in
the Class VII English syllabus and in preparing for my classes I’d found myself
inspired and enlightened by Norberg-Hodge’s slightly cantankerous but
completely uncompromising descriptions of the effects of hundreds of cashed up
trekkers tramping in all their mountaineering glad-rags through her favourite
Himalayan village.
In the article she recounts how her
Ladakhi friends became enchanted by the lifestyle and culture of these strange and
wonderful creatures who never seemed to work yet appeared to be laden with
large amounts of cash. She details the way her neighbours’ perceptions of their
own lives shifted so that instead of seeing their village life as being rich in
community, spirituality and culture and comfortable in terms of material needs,
they soon began describing themselves as poor to the visiting tourists, hoping
for extra gifts or generous service tips.
The week before the WWE incident,
the students at our school, along with other students all across Bhutan,
celebrated Teacher’s Day by showering their teachers with presents, performing
hilarious cultural shows and serving up a delicious lunch of rice, chilli and
cheese. At my school, students ambushed me at the school gate, folding
themselves in half as they bowed deeply and pushed cards and presents into my
hands. Many boarding students had stayed up late, hand-making cards inscribed
with florid, heartfelt poems, extolling the virtues of teachers as ‘our second
parents’, as ‘lights in the darkness’ and (my favourite) as ‘the candle that
burns them-self’. If only they knew…
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| Class II students milking the cute... |
I began to worry that all my
students’ sincere and heartfelt devotion was being eroded by the rampant
culture of ‘me’ being presented to them via more than seventy local and international
channels. Were my dear, sweet, oh-so-earnest students about to abandon all
their beautiful character traits and love of Bhutanese culture in pursuit of
the blinged up-slap’em-down power-mongering they were seeing on WWE? Were they,
like the Ladakhi teenagers in Norberg-Hodge’s essay, about to start seeing
their village life as impoverished and inadequate? Were they going to start
wearing gimp-masks and mankinis to school and trying to triple-pile-drive me
every time I failed them on an English essay?
My anxieties spun on quietly
through my mind throughout the week. I’d read articles about the influence of
television in Bhutan since its inception in 1999, about the sudden increase in
drug-addiction and drug-related crime, inter-family violence, young students
imitating wrestling moves at school and teenagers dissatisfied with their lives
in Bhutan. Should I be worried? Should I look to take action? What would John
Cena do? Helena Norberg-Hodge?
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| Class VI girls preparing for their boedar dance |
A week after the WWE incident,
preparations for our annual cultural concert came to a head. I found myself roped
in as an official judge as 39 separate dance and cultural items were performed in a row for an exhausted staff and
student body. The dances ranged from an outrageously cute interpretation of
Gangnam Style by Class II, to the coy flirtatiousness of Class VII’s rigsar
dancing, to the remarkable grace of the senior girls’ boedar candle dance. But the absolute show-stopper, the crowd,
judge and teacher favourite was without a doubt the traditional Boegarp be Sonam Drugkyel dance performed by a group of sixteen Class
VI boys, including most of the boys I’d busted watching WWE in the tshonkhang.
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| Tenzin Dorji B getting psyched up for the Class VI Boegar be Sonam Drugkyel performance |
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| Class VI boys after their Boegarp be Sonam Drugkyel performance |
As part of the dance, the boys donned
simple black ghos, ceremonial head-wreaths made from local willow and all
manner of traditional swords, shields
and drums. No soundtrack was provided, the music coming solely from the boys’
own joyous singing, their wild energy directed into the stamping of their feet
as they rotated rhythmically in a circle on the stage. Verses were marked out by
drum beats and war cries before the dance ended with a mock battle between the
two opposing armies much to the raucous delight of the local audience.
The students were beaming, their exuberance unmistakable.
They posed proudly for photos and even Tenzin Dorji ‘B’, devoted disciple of John
Cena, ran up to the Vice Principal exclaiming happily: “I…I! Star dancer,
madam!” Lopen Thinley, the class teacher who had chosen and taught the students
the dance laughed with me as Tenzin Dorji gleefully posed for another ‘snap’.
“Tenzin Dorji B, I think he enjoyed the dancing!”
And for the rest of the month (at
least) all my fears of rampant cultural diffusion and were allayed. My Class VII
students promised to teach me their rigsar
dance and then took great delight in my musical ineptitude. In return I tried
to teach them some swing dancing and by the time the concert rocked around they
performed some passable Lindy Hop for their ‘special item’. Phub Lham, one of
my Class VII students, was even inspired to try out a new English phrase, informing
me enthusiastically after our performance that learning swing dancing was
‘awesome’.
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| Class VII girls in rigsar item costume |
And although like most teenagers in
the world my students will still face significant challenges in negotiating their
multiple cultural worlds, I feel more confident that at least they will have
plausible alternatives to an angry, steroid-ridden world where over-sized men
wear gimp-masks, yellow mankinis and spend all day stomping on each other’s
heads.
