I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to Bhutan. Excluding a couple of days in Jerusalem and a whirlwind tour of the Soviet Union in the early 1970s that included stops in Samarkand, Bukhara and Tashkent, my only lengthy trip to Asia was to China and Japan in 1981. That’s a long time ago, just a few years after China began allowing Americans to visit under strictly controlled conditions. Visiting a country profoundly Buddhist like Bhutan is far different than taking a tour of Communist country that once upon a time was Buddhist. My first recommendation to anyone planning a visit to Bhutan is to learn as much as you can about Bhutanese Buddhism, especially about Guru Rinpoche and the many legends surrounding his visit to Bhutan.
As to lasting impressions, Bhutan is a land of contradictions, a country in transition from the old to the new. I’ve shown a few examples along the way, but here are two photos that focus on technology.
Old Technology: A Fire Truck
New technology: Radio, tv and cell towers
Like any third-world mountainous country, universal access to land-line telephones or over-the-air television was never an option in Bhutan. Today there certainly are places without cell reception just like in the US, but the proportion of the population with telephone access has to be many, many times what it used to be.
While significant steps have been taken to improve communications, access to electricity, education, and health care, some of the things one sees while touring Bhutan remind one of pictures from our past–like the fire truck, village water spigots, and animal-drawn plows.
In 1940 just under half of the housing units in the United States had complete plumbing facilities. While I could not find any housing statistics for Bhutan, my guess is that the percentage of Bhutanese households with complete facilities is less than that today while now less than 1% of American households lack complete facilities. Given Bhutan’s terrain and low population density, will it take the Bhutanese 60 years to achieve parity? Or do they even want parity?
What will Bhutan look like twenty years from now? Will the people be as devote as they are now? Will they embrace their new constitutional, democratic monarchy?
Despite all our socio-economic differences, Americans are very egalitarian. We firmly believe it is possible to change one’s situation in life–from poor boy to rich man, from illiterate to lawyer, from farmer to scientist, etc. We want others to have the ability to have what we have (although there are many who don’t want to pay for it even when we’re talking about basic public services like water, sewer, roads, public parks, etc.). We also believe it’s a person’s responsibility to bring about change.
Coming from this background it’s hard to envision what will happen in Bhutan. Change in Bhutan seems to be a top-down affair. The king was responsible for initiating efforts to improve education and health services. The king pushed for the change from a strict monarchy, and many were unhappy with this decision. I don’t know enough about Buddhism to know if the acceptance of one’s life as it is without thought of change (be it the basics of life such as sanitation or one’s socio-economic status) is so inherent to the religion that the people will never see their role as change agents or whether access to Western thought will bring forward thoughts of change.
If I could improve one thing about Bhutan, it would be sanitation, and I don’t just mean indoor plumbing. Perhaps the hand-washing campaign last winter as a means to avoid swine flu was overkill, or maybe it was the primary reason there was no pandemic. But, having been inundated with messages about how to avoid the spread of disease in the weeks before I left for Bhutan, the lack of such basics as a need for hand-washing with soap before handling food just jumped out at me in Bhutan (and Nepal). And do you remember what sidewalks and walking paths were like before leash laws and “clean-up after your pets” rules? Well, add cows, chickens and all other kinds of animals to the mix. Pelden implied the government was not unaware of the problem and that someone, probably similar to an agriculture extension agent, did try to work with villagers about the need to improve sanitation.
Returning to my introduction of Bhutan on this blog weeks ago: Is Bhutan Shangri-La? Yes, people seem happy, and I met noone like the young man in Travelers and Magicians who wanted to escape to New York. On the other hand, No. The Land of the Thunder Dragon has never claimed to be utopia, and it dropped its shield against the rest of the world decades ago. Looking beyond the concept of Shangri-La to the story-line of Lost Horizons, I, like Robert Conway (Ronald Coleman), had a feeling that all is not quite right here. It was a great place to visit and the people were very nice, but I missed the thought-provoking ideas and intellectual challenges ever present in American life.
