So Close to Heaven (44 page)

“Now I don’t have any time to concentrate on the medical system. But sometimes, when I go to villages on tour, I explain to the public personal hygiene, cleaning up and that sort of thing,” the dzongrab said. “The health of the people is far better now than earlier. In the ancient time, there was VD; now there is no VD at all. In the ancient time, there was a lot of this tuberculosis. Now there is very little tuberculosis; it has been controlled a lot. There was a lot of goiter. Now we have very few because we have iodized.”

Family planning has been more difficult, even in this progressive district. “Those who have understood the benefits are coming forward themselves,” he said. “But the main thing is that most of the Bhutanese are religious-minded people and believe that religion says, if you do family planning it is one of the great sins. The people keep this in mind. So most of them don’t want to undergo family planning. So now we, from all the different angles—from administrative side, from medical side—we’re trying to convince them that three, four is okay, but more than four is very difficult to maintain. They can’t give the education properly to their children, the clothing, everything. It is a great problem.”

Bumthang has a model hospital that, like smaller clinics elsewhere, is designed to bridge quite literally new and older forms of medicine. The
building has two wings: one for traditional methods of healing and one for Westernized care. Patients are encouraged to move across the sheltered walkway between the traditional and modern wings depending on their instincts and the nature of their illnesses or injuries. In Bumthang, the dzongrab said, efforts are also being made to wean people away from a reliance on lamas in times of illness. Throughout Bhutan, where most villages have basic health units but hospitals are few and widely scattered, precious hours can be lost when a sick person first goes or is taken to a monastery or temple to undergo healing rituals.

“If there is some evil, some spiritual problem, the lama can do something by worship of the god, doing some
puja
or something like that, something traditional,” the dzongrab said. “But it is also very necessary to use hospitals. The local people, most of them rely on religion first, then on medicine. Now we have been trying to convince them whenever they feel unwell—something cold, hot, something like that—then and there they must attend a medical person. We try to explain this to them. And on the lamas’ side, also, we have a program. We try to use them as media. All the lamas go on invitation to villages frequently. So the government thought, maybe also we can use the lamas as messengers, so that they can also motivate the people to go to the hospital when they find someone sick. So we are using the lamas like the women’s associations and the posters as motivators for progress.”

Because Bumthang has as easy a relationship with foreigners as it has with new ideas, it is an especially good candidate for experimental development projects. One of the first to succeed here was the Swiss Dairy, built by the Swiss development agency, Helvetas. The agency also gave Bumthang one of its most eccentric and beloved citizens, Fritz Maurer, who came to help and stayed to marry a Bhutanese woman and raise a family in an alpine setting not unlike that of a high Swiss valley. Not satisfied with milk alone, Maurer has branched into a line of delicatessen products produced in a processing plant in a hamlet across the Bumthang Chhu from Jakar and sold in a small shop next door that doubles as a bar and tearoom.

His gho casually askew, workworn, and soiled in the tradition of the Bhutanese countryside, Maurer walks briskly through the small cheese factory and drink-bottling plant that has made Bumthang the gourmet capital of the country. Words like “factory” and “plant” need some elaboration in the Bumthang context. The Fauchons of Bhutan is a large
shed with a perennially puddled concrete floor around the sloshing bottle washers and rumbling brewery vats that make juices and alcoholic drinks from local produce. But open a heavy door to the cheese works and you are led to a cool, dry, dark room to stand in the presence of world-class Emmentaler, Gruyère, or maybe Gorgonzola, depending on what kind the cheesemaster is concentrating on that week.

“Have some, and tell me what you think,” Maurer says, slicing through a Gorgonzola wheel and extracting a creamy slice of pungent cheese. “We’re still working on this; I’m not sure it’s right yet.” We go next door to the small outlet-shop-cum-café for biscuits, juice, and coffee to round out the feast. The cheese is superb. No wonder this unusual local product is sold out as soon as a batch is ready for marketing. News that a new shipment of cheese or apple juice or honey from Bumthang has arrived in Thimphu, more than a hundred miles away, can cause a stampede to Shop Number Seven, the exclusive purveyor in the Bhutanese capital for the specialties of Bumthang. All over the country, people taste-test some new alcoholic concoction to emerge from Bumthang’s vats: herbal brandy, for example, or an unusual fruit wine.

The little shop-café next to the cheese works, where Bhutanese and foreigners vie for Maurer’s specialties, seems to be striving for an ambience to match its international reputation. While waiting one day for the dzongda to return from one of his impromptu sanitation inspections, I took an inventory of the decor. To the sound of monks chanting in the next room, the storekeeper’s family temple, I counted more than twenty photographs of Switzerland pasted to the walls of the two-table café, along with a picture of a South Indian temple, two Sylvester Stallone posters, a picture of a Druk Air BAE-146, and another of Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong. Most intriguing was a glossy portrait of a kitten wedged in a gigantic hamburger roll, with layers of cheese, lettuce, and tomatoes on its furry head. An inscription read, in full: “You cannot omelettes without breaking eggs.”

I asked Fritz Maurer once if he ever misses Switzerland. He didn’t seem to think the question meant much. “I go back now and then,” he said. “But I am happy here. And I could live anywhere, I think—except in a hot tropical place.” He had been to Bangkok, which he fled.

Heiko Dekena, a German horticulturist who came to Bhutan more recently to help the Bhutanese develop a seed industry, was more effusive when I went to visit his National Seed and Plant Production Program’s
experimental farm just before dusk on a long, lazy Sunday in Bumthang. Dekena, a crisply tailored, no-nonsense administrator, had spent decades in the developing world, mostly in Africa and Asia, and this would be his last assignment before retirement, he explained. Hardened by years of working in environments of violence and corruption, he was unprepared for Bhutan. After a wonderfully productive year in the country, he was ready to stay a decade. Coolly scientific when talking about his seed-producing plants, he suddenly became passionate on the subject of Bhutan and the Bhutanese.

“I feel for this country with my whole heart,” he said, as we drove up a trackless hillside, fording crystal streams to reach the seed fields. “I love Bhutan so much, like I have never fallen in love with any other place. This is one of the advantages of my work here. It makes life for us very easy. I have no problems at all. I find so much understanding and intelligence. If I want to explain something, I really have interested listeners. I have never felt it so easy to come close to the people.”

As the sun was sinking, Heiko Dekena and I returned to the Bhutanese house he and his wife, Cristel, have furnished and decorated with the work of local craftspeople. He reminded me it was the first Sunday in Advent, and there was a homemade
Apfelkuchen
for the occasion, along with coffee and a bowlful of whipped fresh local cream. Around a handsome table in that cozy room glowing with golden wood paneling, we might have been in Bavaria, or a small town in Switzerland,
Schlagsahne
and all.

It was not only comfort that the Dekenas had found here in Bumthang, but also trust and friendship. The adaptable Bhutanese meet outsiders as equals and work as colleagues, giving or taking advice as the moment requires. There is great integrity and wisdom here, Dekena said, as he walked through the barnyard of his high-altitude experimental farm sloping down from a hilltop over nine thousand feet above the Bumthang Valley. Expensive imported farm machinery is left undisturbed in isolated, unlocked sheds. Dekena said he could leave a million dollars on the table in his office and it would not be touched. In return, he says, he tries to understand without criticizing the farming methods of the rural Bhutanese, who he believes are depleting the land and degrading seed stock by overworking small plots in traditional ways.

“I can’t call it primitive, because there is nothing on earth that is primitive,” he said. “It’s just a different way of life, a different way of
working. When people have lived here for such a long period, then we have to accept that. But on the other side, we are here to improve something. It’s not a question of being critical. It’s more or less asking whether if something is going on on the right side maybe it is also possible to do it on the left side, and so on. Just to give the idea.”

From what Dekena has seen and experienced in Bumthang, he believes that Bhutan stands a good chance of developing its small economy without losing its spiritual culture or destroying the rural social fabric—or the village farming system—because it came into the foreign-aid game late, after many other countries had made serious mistakes. He applauds the determination of the royal government to make its own decisions, not to be whipsawed by powerful international agencies with prepackaged programs and agendas of their own, often concocted in cultural vacuums continents away.

He is so convinced of Bhutan’s potential for success that he has decided if Germany will not see his seed program through several planting and harvesting cycles, he will ask Bhutan to allow him to stay as a private citizen-expert. He made this point in an audience with King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, an event he describes as “a great honor.” In that thirty-minute conversation, he said, “I committed myself to His Majesty.”

And so a modern seed-producing farm with European technology flowers on a hill not far from the holy spot where the Guru Rinpoche’s walking stick took root and produced a miraculous tree. There is room in Bumthang’s heart—and maybe Bhutan’s—for both. For many Bhutanese, this is critical to their survival and maybe to their brand of mountain-grown Buddhism. There is an unspoken sense that somewhere a place must be saved for the Buddha’s next appearance on earth.

“From this place, since early times,” records the Special Commission on Cultural Affairs, “arose kings and ministers, scholars and saints. Here were built marvelous, sacred temples. This glorious tradition will remain alive: such illustrious personages and such magnificent structures for worship will continue to appear in Bumthang, which is destined to be the seat of the future Buddha Maitreya”—the Buddha-to-come.

O
NE
AFTERNOON
in Kathmandu, I sat down for a while to draw on the wisdom of His Holiness Ngawang Tenzing Zangbo, the abbot of Tengboche monastery, which rests in the lap of Mount Everest. I asked him how much it mattered whether or not the last Himalayan Buddhist kingdom, Bhutan, survived.

“As far as the survival of the Bhutanese is concerned,” he answered, “I believe this: We must work everywhere to save our religion and culture, not in Bhutan alone. Ladakh, Sikkim, Bhutan, Nepal—everywhere in the Himalayas.”

The rinpoche fears the effects of materialistic success on Buddhism; for him, hewing to Buddhist purity is central to the salvation process. But he also said that all Himalayan Buddhists and those who value their teachings should ponder the hubris of Tibet, where he studied.

“In Tibet they thought that Tibet was the only one, and that this would last for all time. Tibet had everything, and kept everything to itself. When that went, everything went.

“Now we know that our religion must be preserved everywhere. Only that way can we also save Bhutan.”

bukhari
Bhutanese metal woodstove

chhu
river

chogyal
king in Tibet or Sikkim

chorten; stupa; chaitya
religious monument, square or dome-shaped in a variety of sizes, often containing relics of a holy man or religious scripts and objects

dasho
nonhereditary title conferred on high officials in Bhutan

dewan
Indian adviser to chogyal of Sikkim, functioning as prime minister

druk
dragon; thunder or thunder dragon

Druk Gyalpo
king of Bhutan or the Drukpas; translated ceremonially as Precious Ruler of the Dragon People

Druk Yul
Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon; Bhutan

dzong
Himalayan monastery-fortress; in Bhutan, headquarters of a dzonkhag

dzongda; dzongdag
district administrator in Bhutan

dzongpon
administrator of semiautonomous subregion in Bhutan