Karma Yonten, the founder of Greener Way and of course the winner of Global Entrepreneurial Award of the year, is a friend of mine on social media for quite sometime. I was following his greener way with admiration and shown interest to meet him. Thus it happened last weekend at Simtokha. We sped past each other on the narrow road and both of us pulled over and began conversing like we knew each other for ages.
We met again yesterday over coffee and shared so much within the short span of time he had in hand. He is a young man who has already seen so much of life in so many different shades. Listening to the stories of his journey before he found the Greener Way is heart wrenching yet so inspiring. He is still struggling despite all the name and recognition but he is built to survive out of the comfort zone. He is among the few Bhutanese who will go down in history for having dare to think and work differently. When are we going to break out boxes?
I was watching a documentary on Aljazeera last evening that
gave me a wonderful surprise- can you believe elephants are afraid of bees? Jim
Carey is right, size doesn’t matter. Well this is one of nature’s many unusual phenomenons.
After seeing how elephants panic and run away when they hear buzzing of bees my
heart went out to the coward giant.
But the documentary was not intended at insulting elephants
whatsoever, it was rather about how farmers in Kenya have used this weakness in
elephant to defend their crop. Elephant is the last animal anyone wants to see
in their fields because they are infamous for wiping off the entire harvest in
a night. Kenya is home to a large population of elephants, which is good news
for nature lovers but a very bad one for farmers whose only source of
livelihood is their crop. They have been in continuous state of war for
survival ever since the natural habitats of elephants were disturbed by the
growing human population and developmental activities.
Killing elephants is the only option the farmers had but
that was illegal, and other option was to die of hunger. They don’t have the
luxury of using electric fence like Bhutan (They don’t even have the power to light
their homes). But out of the blue an idea came that is going to change
everything. Now farmers are encouraged to do bee farming along with their usual
crops. The bee hives are hung strategically around the field interconnected by
a string that runs around the field like a fence. When elephants encroach into
the farm they will touch the string, which will shake the bee hives and excite
the bees. And you know that happens when elephants hear the bees buzzing- right
they run for their lives.
Bee Fence!
In southern Bhutan, our farmers are bothered by elephants too,
and the best we have done so far was setting up electric fences around the
fields. Due to heavy investment government could not provide electric fences to all
the farmers. It will take another round of foreign grants from friendly
countries to have our southern farms protected against elephants. But there are
a few questions we have to ask:
1.Is the investment worth the return?
2.Is the method sustainable?
3.Is it Eco-friendly?
4.Is it safe for other wildlife?
5.Is it safe from humans?
Bee fencing method will not only be the answer to all the
questions but also give farmers sweet harvest of honey. It will defend them
from elephants and also enhance their harvest with so many bees pollinating
their crops. Solar electric fence might sound like a very green idea until you
see the cost attached with it. After listening to Gunter Pauli, the founder ofBlue Economy, I admire what Kenyans have learned from nature. When will we do
this?
Of all the changes that happened in recent times I loved the idea of walking to office on Tuesdays. And I loved the way many people received it. We were walkers until recent times, our ancestors walked all their lives, and our living parents walked the best part of their lives. We have walking DNA in us, which should still be very much there. It's only Tuesday we are going to acknowledge our DNA, and I hope we don't cheat ourselves by taking cabs and buses. If two cars meet on the road its called accident but when two persons meet on the road the story is different. Walking together will provide long opportunity to interact and form relationships and some day we will look at Tuesdays as vacations.
Chimi R Namgyal on BO
I walked the best days of my life, and it was a day in 2009 that I finally bought a car and became lazy. Cars are like pampered kids, they suck through our pockets day in day out and we still love them. And I love my car best because I have some really bad experience with walking. I wanted my revenge on the once-upon-a-time of my life. Those first two years in Bajothang gave me a few occasions to visit Wangdue Dzong, that was when I asked if we really had 72% of forest cover because that wasn't one tree on the entire road from Bajo to Wangdue Dzong. After having baked and roasted three times on that road I put together all my guts and bought a car.
Typical Treeless road in Bhutan
We have hell lot of trees but they are all in the jungle where monkeys live, if we are to encourage walking we have to have tree by the roadside and make walking a pleasure. I love the road from Paro Town to Nemizampa, we could replicate that very easily. I prefer walking over driving if only roads are friendlier.
Mission Possible
I hope to see the Pedestrians’ Day become very popular throughout the country, and I hope to see green roads where everybody loves to walk. Because in Walking we can regain our lost tradition of social interaction and relationships.
The long excited wait for the end of the month ends in an hour of bliss, this is the story of every ordinary Bhutanese working on salary. Our salary, which lands in our hand in slow motion disappears like a ghost. That one hour of ownership you have over your salary, before it goes on to fill up the holes you have created throughout the month, is all the joy you could have by right.
How do you extend your ownership over your salary? You are not a delivery boy who collect the salary from your office and go from shops to fuel pump to BPC to Telecom to your landlord to deliver their share as if it were their salary you collected. You money has the right to say in your purse for a night at least.
Since you can't produce petrol you have to buy it. If you don't own a house you have to rent one. Telephone and power bills are unavoidable. You have to pay for clothes since you can't weave on your own. But what about a tomato? or an onion? a bunch of Coriander leaves? Can't we grow them? or do you want to put so much pressure on your salary?
You will call me miser but I call myself awake. I started a kitchen garden- a small one. It gives me a reason to wake up early and feel the dewdrops on the leaves. It gives me time to relax in the evening with a cup of tea along with my wife. It shall give all the basic vegetables I will ever need in a few weeks time- green and fresh.
Legend has it that the Wind in Wangdue comes from a hole in the elephant hill. And many still believe so, finding no geographical justification to why Wangdue should be so windy when places around it are calm. To add more gravity to the legend, the wind at the southern end of the Wangdue Dzong is man-blowing; if you haven’t been there you don’t really know how windy the windy Wangdue is.
Man-blowing wind.
The gigantic prayer flag on the hill waves ferociously with sound enough to surpass twenty scooters starting at once, every blade of grass points in the direction of the wind, trees seem to have lost much of their leaves to the wind… every inch of the hill spells out the power of the wind.
I went looking for the hole, from the head to the tip of the trunk of the elephant hill. I wanted to photograph the wind at its source, but the legend remained a legend- I couldn’t find the hole this time. But the wind blew me into wonder- is so much power going to go wasted everyday in blowing dust around? Or embarrassing and shy girl by blowing up her kira, or by blowing off a bald man’s hat? Can’t it be harnessed into useful energy- to pump water or generate electricity? Because even if there is no wind hole in the hill there is undeniable power of wind sweeping the hill at all times.
Bajo has as many trees as twenty schools in Thimphu could dream for and all the thanks to its alumni who had spared no June 2 since 1997. It's sad that the day is no more a national holiday but Bajo has no hard feelings against whoever is responsible. We have enough tree to breath for next hundred years.
Bajo Campus!
But not all part of Wangdue is as lucky. The magnificent dzong is exposed to the full fury of the wind, which has left it as the last dzong without CGI roof. Everything around the dzong points in the direction of the wind. There is hardly any tree left to shield the massive structure from the wind, and therefore over three hundred students from Bajo School joined the foresters and Dzong project workers in planting over thousand tree saplings around the dzong. If the wind would spare it, in next twenty years you would see how beautiful Wangdue dzong looks in the green wood rather than wild cactus.
