Making Momos

Norbu Tshering, his wife, Yangchen, and their two sons live across the Punatsangchhu (the river created by the conjoined Mo Chhu and Po Chhus) in a somewhat traditional Bhutanese house Norbu's parents built for them when they got married.  To describe the house as a "traditional Bhutanese house" is stating the obvious: to preserve Bhutanese culture, all houses are built with the fancifully painted dentils and Moorish-looking windows one sees in all the photos of Bhutan.  What sets Norbu's house apart from a Bhutanese farmhouse is that it does not have a ground floor that was originally designed to house the livestock or an outdoor kitchen, nor does it have the wooden shutters and the slanted rammed earth walls that characterize the hand-crafted farmhouses of Bhutan (these features of the Bhutanese farmhouse--still the most common form of architecture here--are meant to provide stability to the building; the wooden shutters are not like those in the west that fold in on themselves.  Instead, they are solid boards that slide open, and, when shut, keep out the dust, heat, rain and insects while also helping to prevent the walls from cracking, a hazard of mud walls.  The inward cant performs the same function).  Norbu is a fellow English teacher and his wife is a middle school teacher, and they are, in their tastes and behaviors, as urbane as a Bhutanese couple can get without living in Thimphu--their only livestock is a cat named Sando. It is my good fortune that Norbu is a master momo maker and that he invited me over to his house to learn the craft.

There is a variety of momos--beef, chicken, pork, cabbage and cheese.  Knowing I would want vegetarian momos, Norbu asked me to bring a kilo of cabbage and a kilo of maida, the highly processed wheat flour from India that is preferred for its smooth texture.  It was the warmest and sunniest afternoon I've experienced since arriving in Punakha, and I had walked the three miles from Khuruthang to Norbu's, so the chilled Druk 11000 beer (brewed in Bhutan) that Norbu poured me when I arrived slaked my considerable thirst.  

On a hot day it aint bad.  The lager is better.

We sat out on his deck, the imposing and magisterial dzong across the river below, and chatted before Norbu gave me the task of mincing the kilo of cabbage while he mixed the dough for momos.

In Bhutan, there is no such thing as a measuring cup or spoons, so everything is done by eye and feel.  As I sat on a low bench in Norbu's kitchen chopping cabbage, he, with a little help from his son Gephel, mixed what looked like a cup and a half or two cups of maida with perhaps a cup of water that he poured into a well he made in the center of the flour.  To this he added a teaspoon or so of baking powder and kneaded the dough until it was somewhat stiff and only slightly sticky.  

Norbu and Gephel mixing momo stuffing

As he worked, I added several small chopped red onions and salt to the cabbage, and then cut some of the ubiquitous Amul cheese (like American cheese) into small cubes and added that to my mixture, an exorbitant and tasty--but unnecessary--addition.  

Norbu divided the dough into balls about the diameter of a quarter.  These he rolled out onto a small round wooden board with feet designed for this purpose onto which he had put a dusting of flour to keep the dough from sticking.  Each ball made a disc about four inches around and about a sixteenth of an inch thick.  Into each of these he put about a tablespoon of the cabbage mixture, deftly and quickly shaping the dough into crescents with artfully pinched edges.  I tried to follow his lead and make a few myself, but my Ukrainian blood must be thin: my efforts created lumpy wads that didn't stay pinched.  I took over rolling out the dough while he did the filling and shaping.

Rolling out the dough

While we worked, a momo steamer was heating up.  Momo steamers, I assume, can be used to make Chinese buns and any number of other steamed foods and can probably be purchased in the States in any large Asian market.  Comprised of a deep metal pot with two layers of steamer trays and a lid, one simply fills each layer with prepared momos, puts the lid on, and then waits until the dough is just slightly sticky to the touch.  This takes about seven to ten minutes during which time the filling is also steamed, melting the cheese and softening the cabbage and onions.  Yum.

Filling momos

Because in my blog I had said I could eat 15 momos, Norbu insisted that I eat 15 of our momos, so as they came out of the steamer they were piled on a plate with some store-bought ezzay.  Delicious, hot and filling, I tucked into the heap on my plate.  Norbu continued to make and steam them as I ate one after the other.  Just as I was starting on my second plate, Yangchen came home and, after feeding the baby who had been sleeping the entire afternoon, made ezzay from scratch with red chili powder, grated red onions, cilantro, a little warmed oil, and salt (this is, essentially, salsa, and would be fabulous on black beans or tortilla chips).  

Pinching it closed

One completed!

Two styles in the steamer

Ready for the steamer

It took quite a while to use up all the dough and all the filling; from start to finish, I think it took us three hours.  But the recipe made enough momos for a meal for at least six people, unless one of the guests happens to be me!

The first four of fifteen!

Food in Bhutan #1

People who have traveled through Bhutan as tourists often complain about the monotony and insipidity of the food. It's always the same, they opine, and it is often just indistinguishable goo with tasteless steam-table rice and overcooked vegetables. Often, there is a meat dish that is unidentifiable and mostly bone with a lot of fat swimming on the surface. Breakfast will invariably include fried eggs and toast (since bread is not a staple in Bhutan, the toast is perfectly square white bread redolent with a particularly odiferous and tangy type of local yeast) and corn flakes, served with warm reconstituted powdered milk. The tea is weak milk tea; the coffee is Nescafe. Having spoken to these travelers before my arrival here, I was nervous about being a vegetarian and about becoming bored with the tedium of the same foods at every meal. I need not have worried.

The reason tourists have such negative experiences with Bhutan's cuisine is because they do not actually experience real Bhutanese cooking: the hotels that accommodate tourists seem to cater to a caricature of a tourist--someone who can't handle hot food, who won't eat what looks "weird", who disdains rice, and who likes all the nutrients and texture cooked out of everything. This cartoon traveler MUST have eggs for breakfast and certainly will not tolerate any other hot liquid at meals other than bland tea and instant coffee. Granted, Bhutan, which is just now beginning to develop its tourist industry, has to feed Japanese, German, Dutch, British and American tourists who all have different culinary likes and dislikes, but it seems a shame that Bhutan feels it must forsake its local cuisine as a result.

Real Bhutanese cooking does indeed rely primarily on a trio of foodstuffs that appear in virtually every dish--chiles, salt and oil--but by virtue of the need to be creative with such a limited pantry and because of the influence of Indian and Nepali cooking techniques and spices, Bhutanese food is delicious, healthy (for the average Bhutanese person who labors in the fields all day), inexpensive and easy to prepare.

Students Preparing Chiles for our Teachers' Day Meal

At the heart of Bhutanese cuisine is ema datse, the chili and cheese dish I'd heard about from previous BCF teachers. Very simply, it is hot fresh or dried chiles, sometimes cooked with onions in oil to which is added the local farmer's cheese, called 'datse', and a slice of Amul cheese, a processed orange cheese from India that adds mouth feel and melts quickly. A little water is added to steam the chilies and incorporate the cheese. It is served as a dish separate from, but accompanied by, rice, which is NEVER tasteless or overcooked: Bhutanese rice, usually the red rice sold for $8 a half pound at Whole Foods, is flavorful, something like Jasmine rice, and has a texture I can only describe as al dente; it is chewier than white rice (here, a kilo of this rice costs about $2).

Everyone in Bhutan easts rice three times a day, if not more frequently, and the quantity of rice eaten at each meal is astonishing. I often see students with several cups of rice mounded on their plates at lunch, eaten with about half a cup of a simple potato curry (potatoes are the fourth staple in the Bhutanese diet--again, cheap, easy to grow and transport, and plentiful). Teachers bring their tiffins or their insulated lunch buckets full of rice--probably three or four cups--and it is all gone by the meal's end.

Teacher Meal (from back to front): rice, bean curry, naja,
ema datse, potato curry. The pink container is full of rice;
the red container had a savory and salty fried dough
snack in it.

To vary the diet, ema datse is sometimes made with potatoes or with mushrooms or with any vegetable at hand (beans, for example, in the spring). Indian spices such as mustard seed, cumin, or ajwain may be added. Though it is hard to believe, I still enjoy eating ema datse, the hotter (in spiciness) the better.

Chile choices at the veggie market

Dried local chiles

Perhaps my favorite food here, however, is Tibetan in origin: momos. Anyone who has been to northeastern India, Nepal or Dharamsala knows the momo. It is essentially a piroschki or pierogi, a steamed stuffed dough, here served with ezzay, a sauce of chiles steeped in salt, oil, and spices (the word 'ezzay' actually means salad, but it is usually meant to indicate the chile sauce). The stuffing for momos can be beef or pork, but most often they are stuffed with cabbage cooked with onions, or cheese. When the dough is soft and the filling cooked so that the cabbage is still just slightly crunchy these are delectable. I can eat fifteen of them if left to my own devices.

Cabbage momos and ezzay

Accompanying almost every meal--indeed, accompanying almost every move one makes--is sweet milk tea or naja. Made with loose tea leaves and sweetened powdered milk boiled until the tea is very dark to which is added ginger or cloves or cinnamon or all three, this tea is addictive, though dangerously sweet (it does not, however, approach the sweetness of Indian tea which I actually could not drink). In colder weather or in the evening or when someone just feels like having it, instead of naja there is suja: butter tea. Fortifying, rich, and almost cloying, this tea is not sweet. It is filling and nutritious--if one is trekking across the Himalayas with one's yaks. I think perhaps it is not so nutritious for sedentary teachers and government workers who get their calories from cheese and mountains of rice and naja. Many of us teachers complain about Bhutan Belly, the pudginess that results from a diet that is almost 80% carbohydrates (a pudginess I resent but have to learn to accept as a reality of my new life in Bhutan).

Other foods that are common here are curries, a term used to describe any number of dishes made with mixed vegetables seasoned with ginger, chiles (of course), turmeric, and Indian spices. These are not the curries of the the Punjab or Rajasthan--the use of chiles and the particular mix of spices differentiates them from what we in America think of as a curry.

Preparing a curry

The fast food of choice, aside from the Indian version of Cheetos and Lays Potato Chips (which come in "Tomato Masala" flavor and "American Sour Cream and Onion") is Maggi, Koka or Wai Wai Noodles. These are all essentially salty, spicy varieties of ramen and every restaurant in Bhutan that does NOT cater to tourists has them on the menu as "Chow Min" (sic). They are cooked up somewhat dry and vegetables such as spring onions and beans are added. Frankly, it's pretty tasty and filling. Students here at PHSS buy Maggi noodles at our canteen and, prior to opening the packet, crush the noodles into tiny pieces, then tear open the top and pour in the flavor packet. They then pinch closed the top of the bag and shake the whole thing to evenly distribute the salt and spices. This is their snack, often several times a day (one cannot live on Maggi noodles alone: there is the story of the married couple from Canada who came to Bhutan as BCF teachers and who lived exclusively on Maggi Noodles. They were sent home extremely malnourished, he with infected hemorrhoids).

For a while, my snack of choice was a small, salted, dried plum. The initial taste is overwhelmingly of salt, but when that is sucked off, there is a sweet little plum, like an umaboshi, at the center. There was something about the complementarity of the salty and the sweet that I loved. I became so fond of these, I was eating them like popcorn. I had to stop when I began getting leg cramps at night from being dehydrated from all that sodium.

Dried Plums

NEXT INSTALLMENT ABOUT FOOD: Chile Pops, channa, dal, and how to make an ezzay you can serve at Superbowl Games.

STUDENTS from PUNAKHA HIGHER SECONDARY SCHOOL #2: Dawa Tshering

I am Dawa Tshering and I am 16 Years old. At present I am in 11th grade and my class teacher is Miss Sarah. According to my perspective, I am a humble and hardworking boy. I graduated my 10th grade from a school in southern-Bhutan with exceptional marks.

I would like to share with you my interest. I am interested in listening to music, playing musical instrument, playing games like basketball and table tennis and also making friends with girls. I am a naughty boy but I stay in good manner according to the discipline of our school.

I have experienced many things which I have wished for and I am glad that I have both parents and elders who love me very much.i have many friends from outside the country on FACEBOOK and hope you would also be a good friend to me.

The place where my family lives is Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan. My home town is at Dagapela but my origin is from Punakha and Tashigang. In Punakha the weather is hot and sunny. I am having a little bit of trouble in getting adapted because of the weather condition and school's strict rules and regulations.

Our school is faced upward and the Punakha dzong which is one of the most popular dzong in Bhutan is faced towards our school. We have a park below our school where we go every free period to study and sight see. I think we could be a good friends, if you could share about yourself. What do you like and what don't you like?  .

Your friend in Bhutan,

Dawa Tshering           

STUDENTS from PUNAKHA HIGHER SECONDARY SCHOOL #1 : Chhimi Selden

Chhimi Selden

Life is not a bed of roses. For me life is really challenging since I am from a poor background. My dad left me when I was only a month old. I have never seen him and I miss him sometimes when I see my friends with their dads. Since ninth grade I have been staying with my grandparents because my mom can't afford to send me to school but now I'm living with my mom. Now I'm in eleventh grade. Actually my mom used to stay in Thimphu [our capital] with my step father who is of no use. Since she was having some problems with him she shifted to Punakha [my village] with my two younger brothers. So me and my elder brother decided to stay with her and help her.

As there is no one to help my mom she sometimes goes to work under some people which I hate the most. I wanted to keep her from doing any work because most of the time she feels sick. But we don't have another option as there is no one to help us and  my brother has completed class twelve last year and his marks were not good enough to get him a job. I really love  to help her. Since she goes outside to  earn money, I handle  the chores at home. I do all the  chores at home like washing clothes, preparing meals, cleaning the house, fetching water, giving baths to younger ones as I don't want to give her more burdens anymore. These are the things I do other than studying. I love to study and I have been doing pretty well in my academics. Helping my mom became my passion. Though I don't get good clothes to wear or good meals to eat, still I'm happy because I'm with my lovely mom.

Because of all this I study very hard. Usually many people say that they can't study because there situation is not good and they can't concentrate. But I strongly disagree because for me this situation makes me work really hard, as this situation keeps on reminding me that I have big responsibility to do. To get a job whereby I can help my mom as well as keep her happy. Not only this, my aim in my life is to give the best education to my younger ones. So, I aim to be a Journalist if not at least a teacher.

My questions to all you readers are: What are the things that you do with your parents at home? What do you do besides go to school?

From Bhutan,

Chhimi Selden                 

                                                                                                              

The Photo You've All Been Waiting For: Me Wearing a Kira

At Uma in Kabesa

One of the perks of being a Bhutan Canada Foundation teacher is that every once in a while, Sam Blyth, one of the founders of BCF and its biggest promotoer and fund-raiser, travels to Bhutan and takes some of the BCF teachers out for dinner.  Last night, Andrea Giesbrecht, Thubten Senge and I were treated to a five star meal at Uma, a very swank hotel north of Punakha.  I felt it would be appropriate to wear my new, hand-woven kira.  Here I am in it, standing on the balcony at Uma.

Thanks to Sam for a really lovely evening and a break from saag and ema datse!

How I Live: One Teaching Day

The students wake in the dark at 5:00, roused by a piece of rebar banged on an old truck gear; it starts the dogs barking.  The girls' shouts and laughter in the hostel below me ring through the morning hearth smoke and mist that rises from the valley, obscuring the rumble of the river that flows south past the dzong, on down past Wangdiphodrong and eventually into the Duars, the green flat jungles of Assam.  

The "bell," a ubiquitous dog, and a side of beef (!)

I am still sleeping in the $20 so-called North Face sleeping bag I bought in Thimphu, using my sheets as curtains until it gets too hot to use the bag. After the 5 o'clock bell and barking, I pull the bag over my head and sleep another hour until the alarm on my cheap used Nokia phone wakes me again.  During the night, the warm, dry air has turned chilly; I turn on the heater next to the bed, put on my Crocs (so practical in Bhutan), and go to the kitchen at the end of the hall. Sounds of the neighbors' children practicing their times tables in English and the odd whizz of their mother Anidha blending tea come clearly through the cement wall that divides my apartment from theirs. I turn on the water boiler--a necessity in Bhutan, where the water is not treated before it comes out of the tap--and light the two-burner gas stove under a sauce pan I've filled with water the night before. I've found that these two containers provide just the right amount of heated water for a bath and a cup of tea or coffee in the morning.  I know that heating the water takes about seven minutes, so I tuck back into my sleeping bag as the room warms up.

My Bedroom

The bath is Indian style: it is a 5 gallon plastic bucket of the water I've heated mixed with cold water I collected the evening before since there is no water available in the morning; the girls in the hostel are all showering as I am getting ready for school, and since they are below me on the hillside, the water reaches them first (it is pumped from the river uphill).  I take my bucket of water into the small "bathroom" in which there is a large shallow plastic tub to stand in.  I hang my clothes on the back of the door, setting my Crocs just outside.  I wash my hair first, and then quickly everything else.  The room steams up, but it is cold.

The Kitchen

After the bath, I make coffee or tea in the small amount of water I've left in the sauce pan and take it to my bedroom where I do push ups and sit-ups as I listen to podcasts on my computer of news from the West. When I've finished my exercises, I have a bowl of cornflakes with almonds and raisins that have been soaked in warm water to remove the pesticides and e-coli and anything else they've collected on their journey from India.  If I'm lucky, I've got yogurt--it is hard to get here--and if not, something that is labeled milk, but as it never seems to go sour even though I haven't got a refrigerator, I am not sure I trust the label.

At 6:45 precisely, the pigeons begin to clatter and coo on the roof--their feathers and dirt come into my bedroom under the door; their smell and racket a constant irritation.  At 7:30, I get dressed for work.  I alternate between wearing my kira and wearing slacks, both for comfort and, because of the water shortage, I can't wash clothes very often so I have to be judicious about what I wear and when.

My Flat

The path from my flat to the staff room leads behind the girls' hostel, down a cement staircase, through the canteen where Lobgir, one of the support staff, always offers me sweet milk tea and a snack (in the afternoon, he gives me pakoras; in the evenings, Oreos).  I pass the mess hall and the outdoor taps where the students wash off their plates and cups after breakfast and the dogs linger, waiting for the slop to wash down in their direction.  Nearly every student bows as I walk by and wishes me a "Good Morning, Miss!" as they have been taught to do.

The Girls' Hostel from my Porch

The staff room is the second floor of a new building between the mess hall and the academic building where most classes are held.  The first floor is the new computer lab where the only modem and router are located, so the staff room is where everyone logs onto Facebook or downloads music and illegal copies of American movies.  Spending time in the staff room, one sees how productivity levels are severely affected by the presence of the internet: hardly anyone who owns a laptop is actually working.  Most, including me, are distracted by the seductive winking of the icons on our desktops: The New York Times, The New Yorker and iTunes for me; Bhutanese music sites (which feature 1980s American C&W music, for some reason) and Bollywood videos for the native staff.  I usually arrive early to the staff room to avail myself of whatever bandwidth can be used to download podcasts, articles, and music to access later from home since I do not have internet yet in my apartment, but bandwidth is narrow even when no one is using it, so downloads are always painfully slow.

At 8:15, the students and staff gather in the courtyard for morning assembly.  The courtyard is decorated with paintings of the eight auspicious symbols of Buddhism, the grammatically confused PHSS acronym, and the flags of Bhutan and of PHSS.  Assembly begins with the morning prayer, in Chokyi (classical Tibetan), to Manjushri, the emanation of wisdom, followed by the national anthem and the school pledge, both in Dzongkha.  Next, two students, after bowing to the flag, offer speeches on an inspiring topic, one in English and one in Dzongkha.  The English speeches are almost always about either the importance of being true to oneself, or steps to success lifted from Stephen Covey or Dale Carnegie (self-help books that offer Seven Habits or Twelve Steps are extremely popular here).  The speeches are followed by announcements from the principal and some form of chastisement, either for "defaulting" on the English-only policy* or for littering.  Assembly concludes with a two silent minute meditation: remarkably, every student actually appears to be meditating during this short interval, their eyes closed, their hands cupped in front of them.  It is a lovely way to begin the day.

By 9:00, when the first of the six daily periods begins, the sun has dispersed the clouds and it begins to get comfortably warm, unless one is in one's kira, in which case it is hot.  Due to the spring wind, a fine red dust covers everything and gets in one's eyes and nose, clogs computers and permeates clothes; many students have coughs and sore throats (and as of today, so do I).  Every two periods, a tea break is scheduled.  The students head for the mess or the canteen and get very weak sweet milk tea and chile chops (called "poppers" in America--batter-fried chillies) or pakoras.  After fourth period is lunch.  Depending on my schedule, I try to go back to my flat for a meal of apples and peanut butter; otherwise, I am strongly encouraged to eat with other teachers in the mess (that deserves its own blog posting) where there is always some variation on the theme of rice and potato curry (the frequency and amount of rice and potatoes in the Bhutanese diet accounts for my inability to slim down here).  Sensibly, lunch lasts an hour--it actually feels like a real and welcomed respite in the middle of the day and permits one a few minutes of sitting in the sun and reading more of War and Peace, if one should be so inclined.

The teaching schedule rotates so that every day is different, a welcome change from the way we do things in Portland, though it can be confusing (on more than one occasion, I have gotten the schedule wrong and arrived late to a class or missed it entirely, which fazes no one--students remain dutifully in class with or without a teacher).  

Teaching here is so much less stressful than in the United States.  The stakes are higher, especially in classes 10 and 12 because of the exams, but at the same time the expectations are lower since English is not the first language and, due to the size of the classes (I have from 32 to 46 students in my classes), there is very little homework given, so formative assessment counts as only 10-20% of the final grade.  

Teachers are given a Teacher's Guide for every class that summarizes the learning objectives, associated activities recommended for use in the classroom, and assessment strategies.  Though we are not required to use them, they certainly provide a welcome set of guidelines for a new teacher, and make lesson planning very easy since they are geared to addressing exam questions.  I know that as long as I meet the learning objectives--however I choose to do that--my students have been given the chance to do well on the exams.  The marriage of the Teacher's Guides and the lack of homework to grade makes my work load minimal compared with the daily assessments and the high level of discourse and use of technology expected in my American classes.  

The students, once they become comfortable with the new chillip teacher (Dzongkha for 'foreigner'), are generally enthusiastic, though nervous about speaking English with a native speaker.  They are respectful and well-behaved but as reluctant to complete homework as Americans, in part because it is so rarely given and even more rarely scored, as far as I can tell.  They know it counts for very little in the end, so they are not as wound up about homework as Americans whose homework might count for as much 60% of their final grade.  

In Bhutan, as in India, secondary school students are funneled into one of three "streams" after the results of their 10th class exams are released: Arts, Commerce or Science.  It seems to be common knowledge that those whose scores are the highest are in the Science stream and those with the lowest scores end up in Arts, a misnomer as these students will be teachers (not by choice, sadly), low-level managers in banks or at service companies (Telecom, Bhutan Power), or, in a few unusual cases, journalists.  Students who are actually interested in painting, sculpture, metalwork, weaving or the other "arts" (other than music, which is taught in monasteries) attend the National Institute for Zorig Chusum ('Thirteen Traditional Arts'). 

A very few high-scoring students select the Arts stream because they are interested neither in a career in business nor in science, but for the most part they end up there because their scores were too low to qualify for the other streams. A student who wishes to switch from one stream to another is permitted to do so only if her marks are high in the classes central to that stream.  So an Arts student who wishes to move into Science must have excellent marks in math, biology, chemistry, etc.  Though this sounds egalitarian, the truth is that if a student is in the Arts stream, it is unlikely that she will have taken biology or chemistry, so she can't qualify for the Science stream regardless of her wishes.  (Those who are considering school reforms that approximate this model with career "pathways" in the United States take heed.)  Unlike India, Bhutan cannot yet offer the range of employment opportunities that would effectively support a three-stream education system: science careers are somewhat limited, mostly to agriculture, forestry, and engineering (hydropower in particular, which is government owned; most of the power is sold to India which built the power plants in the first place); commercial opportunities are mostly in small business and tourism or government work.  Indeed, a government job is the most coveted type of employment as it provides insurance and a pension and not a little respect from the rank and file.

My teaching assignments are 11 Arts, 11 Commerce and 12 Arts; untested as a teacher, I have not been entrusted with the presumed pinnacle of teaching, 12 Science.  This is fine with me: though I do think the United States would benefit from developing a national exam, the stakes here are too high and the pressure on the teachers to ensure students' high marks too intense.  Students who do not pass the 12th class exam do not qualify for a seat at a Bhutanese college and must either pay to repeat their senior year at a private school or quit altogether (the highest scorers are offered education abroad, paid for by the Royal Bhutanese government, as is all education, including college and university education). A test that measures student literacy and numeracy at graduation makes sense to me; a test that determines a seventeen-year-old's future does not. [Side Note: There are a few 'special schools' scattered across Bhutan for the blind and for the most needy Special Needs students, but, for the most part, I am not asked to provide accommodations or differentiation in my classes to meet the needs of those for whom learning is a challenge. No student is medicated and none appears to have ADD or ADHD or symptoms of bipolarity or other pathologies (such students may have permanently left school in their elementary years).  Though I do think many students could benefit from IEPs and any class benefits from effective differentiation, the fact that I am not required to provide either makes my job very easy.]

In addition to teaching, all teachers are expected to help run a club (in my case, the Media Club which shares current events at Saturday morning assembly and which, I hope, will explore media literacy and the use of media in learning); to be on committees (Library Committee and Literary Committee, which organizes intra-house debates and extemporaneous speaking competitions, and publishes the school magazine); and to assume regular duties such as Study Duty (morning, evening and night study) and Mess Duty (ordering supplies for the dining hall; determining the menu for the month).  Thus, though my teaching periods amount to relatively few (18 teaching periods in a week), my actual commitment to working at school is pretty high.  In addition, I have been providing remedial classes in English during evening study and will continue to do so.

Instruction ends at 3:35, but, depending on the day, this is followed by S.U.P.W. (Socially Useful and Productive Work, such as planting shrubs or painting the school), or by sports such as volleyball and football, or by clubs/committees (see schedule below).  Every house (there are four mixed-grade and mixed gender houses) is assigned a plot of land to be tilled, planted and harvested during S.U.P.W.  This is an agricultural society, so the students seem to appreciate the opportunity to grow their own food; the boys are especially grateful because they get to expend considerable physical energy hacking away at the earth with their spades.  The girls tend to the watering and weeding and, often, standing around looking a little bored.  Every one of these activities--agricultural work, participation in clubs, sports, debate--is competitive.  Points are awarded and badges given, either to individuals or houses.

Girls Hauling Water from the River

Boys Digging Up Beds

In general, the demand on students is remarkable--two girls I spoke with who are class Captains (an honor) told me they stay up until 11:30 organizing S.U.P.W. and studying, then get up at 4:30 to wash, do laundry, and fulfill their other captaincy duties.  They complained that they are so sleepy in class they can barely attend to what is most important: learning.

After I have fulfilled my commitments on campus, including hacking away at the earth myself, I pass back through the gauntlet of "Good Evening, Miss!" salutations and return in the gloaming to my home.  My evening meals are usually Bhutanese or Indian in flavor, due to the availability of vegetables and spices: saag spiced with ginger, chillies and cumin with red Bhutanese rice and dahl.  Cabbage and cucumber salad.  Tea. Some evenings I spend reading for pleasure or writing (What rapture! What joy!).  When I have water, I do the laundry, again in a bucket by hand.  Sometimes, I visit with other teachers who live on campus, or have dinner in Kuruthang or Bajo with other western teachers in the Valley.  Generally, I am asleep by about 10:30.  

This job is sensible, relaxed, rewarding; the Bhutanese are playful, kind and generous; the country is stunningly beautiful and for the most part undeveloped; and though the standard of living is very low, life is comfortable.  Many people here have asked if I plan to extend my contract for a second year.  Though I do not yet know the answer to that question, I would bet that my teacher friends in the United States would not just understand if I decided to stay--they might envy my chance to do so.

*Consequences for defaulting (defaulters are caught by "informers"--students who have been selected to narc on their peers for speaking any language other than English during classes): First offense--50 prostrations in the courtyard; second offense--100 prostrations; Third offense--150 prostrations; 4th offense--write an essay on a given topic in one hour and then copy it fifteen times by the end of the school day AND do 150 prostrations.  I and many of the students are troubled by the use of a religious practice--prostrating--as a punishment.

The STUDENTS' DAILY SCHEDULE

5:00 am Rising Bell

5:30-6:00 Hostel cleaning

6:00-6:15 Wash and Change

6:30-7:30 Morning Study

7:30-8:00 Breakfast

8:00-8:18 S.U.P.W.

8:20-8:45 Assembly

8:50-9:45 First Period

9:45-10:40 Second period

10:40-10:55 Tea Break

10:55-11:50 Third period

11:50-12:45 Fourth period

12:45-1:45 LUNCH

1:45-2:40 Fifth Period

2:40-3:35 Sixth period

3:35-5:15 Tea Break/Sports

5:30-6:30 Evening Study

6:30-7:00 Evening Prayer

7:00-7:25 Dinner

7:30-8:30 Night Study

9:00 Attendance for boarders in hostel

9:30 LIGHTS OUT

Grammar After Hours

Morning Assembly, Punakha Higher Secondary School

Those of us from the west teaching in Bhutan have been rending our clothes and grinding our teeth in the face of feckless faculty meetings, missing timetables, unannounced changes in our teaching responsibilities and intermittent water/electricity/internet/English-only language instruction (which is mandated by the Ministry of Education).  Though our students are charming, kind, polite, and at least somewhat committed to doing their best, most are so far behind where they need to be in their reading and writing in English that it is hard to imagine them making it from lower primary school into upper primary, let alone scoring well enough on the 12th grade exam to qualify for a coveted seat at one of Bhutan's Royal Colleges.

Formative assessments of my 11th and 12th class students' writing reveal significant gaps in their understanding of basic grammar, very limited vocabularies, and inexplicable sentence constructions.  As we've been repeatedly warned, Bhutan has not yet developed a reading culture (there is one public library IN THE COUNTRY, so far as I know), so there is no reinforcement of language acquisition outside of school other than bad Hollywood movies and Miley Cyrus singles.  Thus, the combination of an incomprehensible school system and alarmingly under-prepared students can engender in a teacher a real sense of hopelessness or, at best, the feeling one is simply treading water under the crest of a Hokusai wave.

Given all of this, I thought the least I could do would be to identify the students who are at greatest risk of doing poorly on the upcoming quarterly exams and use their writing to analyze which skills they most need to improve.  Each day, all boarding students have Morning, Evening, and Night Study, an hour each of mandated study time.  The boys meet in the classroom (students stay in one room all day and teachers move from class to class) and girls in the dining hall to complete homework, read, practice writing in Dzongkha, or prepare speeches for the morning assemblies.  I figured I could pull a small group of students out of Evening Study to work with them on grammar and then see in another formative assessment if it had helped their writing.

I identified four girls and two boys in my twelfth class to work with first on subject/verb agreement.  In class, I announced that I would be seeing them in Evening Study and that I would spend half the period with the boys and half with the girls.  This announcement, not surprisingly, was met with silence; I wondered if I would come to Evening Study and find my students inexplicably absent or be regaled with lame excuses for why it would be impossible for them to give up their precious Evening Study time.  Nevertheless, I prepared twenty practice questions and had the office assistant make four copies (we are not permitted to make more than a few copies of anything; if we really want a class set of something, we have to take a taxi to Kuruthang, 3 km away, and pay for copies ourselves).   I imagined spending about fifteen minutes going over the definitions of "subject", "pronoun" and "verb" and another fifteen minutes helping whomever I could rustle up with the practice questions.  Heck, it was worth a try.

Imagine my surprise when I showed up for boys' evening study and was met by a small group of students from our class asking if they, too, could come to the grammar session even though I hadn't called their names.  I thought they were trying to make it a social affair, so I rebuffed their entreaties, but they persisted.  "Miss," they asserted, "we did not learn the grammar and we need it to improve our writing."  I was flabbergasted: were teenage boys begging to have grammar lessons outside of the regular school day?  Then more boys came into the room (Evening Study was about to formally begin) and ALL of them asked if they could come to the study session.  Then, the four girls I had 'invited' came in to find out where we'd be meeting, and when they heard the boys asking for a whole-class session, they joined in, insisting that all the girls wanted to have special grammar instruction during Evening Study.

And so it came to pass: at about 5:40, all forty-two of my 12th class boarding students came for an hour long grammar lesson.  Even the so-called knuckleheads (my term of endearment for the kids who have a hard time paying attention in class) were attentive; all the students participated; they asked excellent questions; they took thorough notes.  When the bell for evening prayer rang and I was packing up to go, they asked me to do more sessions each night of the week at which I demurred: "I need some nights off, you guys!" I told them.  

One of my classrooms

As the class began to disperse, the students were so appreciative and expressed so much gratitude I was overwhelmed.  A few of the boys told me they loved me; a bunch of them demanded high-fives, and many of them as they left the room gave me "thumbs up," a corny Americanism I use to establish a positive atmosphere in class.  They offered to carry my backpack; they escorted me across the campus; both girls and boys repeatedly wished me "Good Night, Miss," in a tone that was somehow more earnest than the usual requisite "Good Night" I hear as I walk home in the evenings.  

It may be that all the goodwill and mutual feelings of respect and affection generated this evening are fleeting; sometimes, a single auspicious day can bring about magical encounters with ephemeral results.  Then again, perhaps tonight marked a real and lasting step forward in these students' learning as well as in my deep appreciation and respect for the crazy, unpredictable,  maddening school system of Bhutan.

Punakha Higher Secondary School Academic Building