Yangthang Village Youth Club

My village Yangthang was connected by road half a century years ago but it didn't change us much, other than the occasional bus services people walked most of time. There was road but people didn’t have cars to use it. Twenty years ago electricity illuminated our village. The last two decades with road and electricity both couldn't quite transform my stubborn village. We remained backward in our ways of life and in our outlook to life.

The small generation of educated lot had to leave the village, and some of them who had strong influence over the village couldn't quite reconnect to the village realities, therefore fancied the idea of maintaining our village like a living museum- after all how much can they do during their week long annual visits? 

Over the years my generation of educated lot thrived and we were bigger in number but we too had to leave the village. Our village still remained a museum and we were mere annual tourists who only dreamt of bigger changes and better lives. We were disappointed but to our credit our tradition and our values were well preserved, we were harmless as much as we were helpless. 

Then the television made a grand entry. Few households that had TV became the popular hub of social gathering, our sleep pattern changed, our conversation lessened and overnight change became evident. It was at least serving a good purpose of giving people a common place and common subject to dwell on after their hard day's works until every house hold got their own TV sets. Then it isolated families. People stopped coming out, they talking about issues in Indian serial homes rather than issues at home and in the village. Younger generation showed lesser interest in the village affairs thereby risking the natural course of transition of tradition from one generation to another. 

Just when we thought the worst have happened the smartphones revolution began and this time it didn’t take long before the urban wind blew into the villages. With huge literate population living in the village the social lives became virtual just like in towns. That’s a dangerous trend invading the most potential generation in our village at the moment.

During the Launch

While it is tempting to force some solutions out of books, we must remember the classic egg breaking analogy which goes- if an egg is broken by outside force, life ends. If broken by inside force, life begins. Great things always begin from inside. We are more or less mere outsiders in our village and in their generation. If meaningful change has to happen it has to come from among themselves. We can only facilitate.

The youngest group

One of the significant facilitation was construction of the READ center in my village. It’s the first step toward an enlightened community. The facility is serving its purpose and beyond, and it’s continuously developed to suit the need of the community. It’s interesting to see how our people’s expectation from the READ center is changing and growing. At times they push the librarians to their wits end and thus we lost one librarian.

Electoral Education 

To ensure effective use of the facility and to address our growing issues, including taking responsibility of the center and other common spaces I have thought of a village youth club, which finally became a reality on the first day of Lomba. I named it Yangthang Village Youth Club. On the day of its launch we had 58 students, living and going to school from the village every day, registered as members. I am hoping this youth body, given the right conditions and opportunities, would identify and address our own local issues. I am also hoping that their unity will inspire and build harmony in the community and ensure better rural lives. Lopen Chimi Rinzin, a senior teacher and very steadfast member of the village agreed to lead the pack as the club master.

Youth goes to Poll

So far we received support from the following organization and individuals

1.     Rotary Club of Thimphu: A computer set for club works

2.    Deki Om: 45 pieces of club T Shirts

3.    Karma Yangzom: 45 pieces of club caps

4.    Dzongkhag Election office: In electing club captains.

The two individual donors are from our own village living away. Like them there are many successful folks living away from home that I hope will support the village through the club. I have received commitments from some friends for certain initiatives and I’m also looking forward to capacity building and life skills training for the members from READ Bhutan, VAST, BCMD, and YDF.

Some of the strategies outlined for the club are;

1.    Volunteerism in the Village

Yangthang Village Youth Club intends to serve the village community to address local issues and needs in the areas of health, environmental sustainability, cultural preservation, and socioeconomic development.

These activities include but are not limited to:

·      Conduct advocacy programs to promote health and hygiene in the village

·      Provide helping hands during cultivation and harvest

·      Take initiatives to manage village waste (behavioral change, waste segregation, decomposing, recycling)

·      Take ownership of common spaces in the village and initiate maintenance works to ensure the sustainability of the common spaces: Lhakhang, Archery ground, Electric fencing, Bridges, Chortens, Flood retention wall, Drainage, Road, Drinking water source, etc.

·      Volunteer and provide support during village events

·      Plan and undertake the building of small social infrastructures: Dustbins, Pit, Menchhu, Fencing, Wall, Rest House, Footpath, Water supply, etc.

·      Reforestation of barren land along the river

2.    Educational Enrichment

In addition to civic engagement, the Yangthang Village Youth Club also provides educational platforms that enrich the learning experiences of the youth members. These activities include:

·      Initiate a comprehensive village reading program

·      First Friday For Folk Tales: Invite a village elder to tell folk tales to children. Children will also attempt to rewrite the folk tales.

·      Sunday Reading Hour: One Sunday in a month, Children gather at the READ center to read for one hour together.

·      Sunday Book Talk: Another Sunday in a month, few selected children will talk about the books they read. Their reviews will be display on the wall for a month.

·      Initiate a youth mentorship program

Older youth members can provide mentorship to younger members in terms of academics and other areas of youth development

·      Initiate a Spiritual Life speakers program

Invite a local monk or nun to come speak to the youth once every month to explain some religious concept or lead a short prayer/meditation

3.    Youth Leadership

Lastly, the Yangthang Village Youth Club provides the youth members with the opportunity to learn key leadership skills through the club’s management and development. Club captains will be elected annually through standard electoral process. This not only enables the club members to practice the principles of democratic citizenship, but also enables the elected youth captains to step up and provide guidance and voice for the club members. All club members will also learn to raise and generate funds to support the club’s programs and sustainability.

Lastly, many of the club meetings and activities will be held in the READ Center in the Yangthang READ Center. The club members will be responsible for ensuring that the Yangthang READ Center facilities that they use are well-maintained, tidy, and well-utilized.

Letter to Thimphu Thrompon: What's the Worth of a Poor Man's Life in Your City?

Dear Thrompon Kinley Dorji, Thimphu,

I have very high regards for you. You have been the biggest and the nicest surprise we had out of the voting machine. I applauded you every time I saw you on TV; for your work, you honesty, your fairness and your fearlessness. But this time I am thoroughly disappointed with you.

I want to ask you, what’s the worth of a poor man’s life in your city, Thimphu? The way you handled the death of your 63-year-old employee was very insensitive as the employer. He died in the line of duty and it was your duty to give him an honorable funeral and compensate his family as per the company policy. But you have reduced his life’s worth to Nu.40,000 that’s not even worth the smart phone in your hand. You have left the rest to the fate of the case against the building owner who is busy blaming the ambulance.

Amidst this shameless and endless blame game the sentiments of the poor family is sidelined. The family’s sole bread earner is gone, widow is in her sixties who now has to look after several children, some of whom are disabled. The family is not even worried about car or phone, they are running out on food supplies. Why should the family suffer for so long? The family needs support now and the company compensation should have reached them already. You as their leader should have at least managed to comfort the family with normal compensation.

The building owner who built that burial wall should be held responsible for death of a public servant on duty due to their negligence. This case should be fought with all your might and come out with a landmark victory that will pave way for all Bhutanese to understand their right and to respect other’s right, regardless of social status. Whatever you can draw out from them can be paid to the bereaved family as additional compensation. Yes, additional compensation, the real compensation should not depend on this.

And if the wall owner thinks Nu.200,000 is huge and wants to keep blaming the hospital for not sending a health worker along with the driver, then they should perhaps read the story of a widow who won a $23.6 Billion Lawsuit against tobacco company R.J. Reynolds. In this case, her husband died of lung cancer and not killed by their company truck.

Personally, today on father's day I miss my father who was killed in a bus accident. The bus company should have been responsible, the driver should have been responsible, or the house owner who kept debris on the narrow road should have been responsible but only my father paid the price. My family alone suffered. This should not happen to anyone at this time and age. 

So, dear Thrompon please pay the compensation first and then pursue the case with the wall owner. In your city even a pet dog gets more respect, he was a human being, he worked for the city, don’t let this happen.

Still Very Respectfully Yours
PaSsu

The Best Public Toilet in the Country

If something is not good enough, go and change it. If you can’t change it, seek help but change it.

It was my turn to design a social service activity yesterday afternoon at the Royal Academy. My team knew I would certainly point at a toilet, because ever since I founded Bhutan Toilet Org I have been after toilets like Romeo.

Dr. Prabrat was after me for days, wanting me to plan the program in detail and on paper, in his very Oxford way but I assured him about how I had everything on my fingertips, after all it was a toilet we were talking about.

The plan was to whitewash the wall, scrub the pots and tiles, educate the caretaker and make the only public toilet in Paro town worth Nu.5 it charges per use.

I requested Dasho Dzongrab, Kinley Gyeltshen for approval and he in turn instructed Municipal authority to assist us. From the municipal we understood that Paro didn’t have a wet sweeper after the one they had, died. The current caretaker is an employee who is assigned toilet duty only on Sundays. The only sewage truck in the valley is broken down.

But I made it clear to the Executive Engineer of the Municipal office that we were going beyond complaining, by becoming a part of the solution, something I learnt from BCMD’s media nomad workshop last year.

The condition of the toilet however shocked my team; my worst description was just the tip of the shit-berg that even I, who made few inspections before, couldn’t believe. The door was locked with countless dents of break in attempts. There was a fresh poop right at the door. No portion of the wall was spared from doma stains. The two sinks and four toilet pots were coated with thick layer of deposits. God knows how some poop went right up on the wall. The only remaining two flush tanks were filled with bottles and sanitary pads. The caretaker used the useless bathrooms for scrap collection. The worst was what lies behind the toilet; all the connections to septic tank were blocked and therefore sewage has been overflowing straight into open drain for years. The drains have eventually disappeared under overgrowth and you can see fresh yellow all over the green.

Any logical person with authority would recommend demolishing of the out-of-hand eyesore standing in between taxi stand and vegetable market, two populated areas. But we were there to rescue it. We whitewashed the wall first and our artist Nima Tshering wrote “A Clean Toilet!” and that was what we went there for.

The Driving Force

The 14 of us dug, swept, brushed, scrubbed, and washed in our effort to make this toilet worth paying Nu.5. After three hours the inside of the toilet started glittering but tones of poop behind the toilet didn’t seem like something we could deal with.

God Knows, how this could happen

The only institution that could help was fire department of the Police. We made a few calls and big red fire truck appeared. Three rounds it took to wash down the whole history of shits in Paro. The three firefighters went out of their ways to help us. We can never thank them enough.

Help from Police Department

The clean toilet that we aspired was ready. But in two days we didn’t want all our effort to be covered in shit. Municipal already said they were running short of manpower to look after the toilet. But the executive engineer readily agreed to allow us to hand it over to some organization that could take better care of it. That’s when my team thought of Chithuen Phenday Association, with whom we share close ties. We called them over to consider our proposal and right there standing near the toilet Paro Municiapl Authority agreed to handover, and Chithuen Phenday agreed to takeover. The orphan toilet finally got adopted and hence it will be open throughout the week and a gate will open to taxi stand too. Anybody misusing the public property will be held responsible and if the culprits are not found then the association will be help responsible.

The toilet will be handed over formally in few days after the plumbing damages are fixed but ownership and accountability are transferred with immediate effect. Paro will hereafter have the best Public toilet in the country. Other Dzongkhags are encouraged to follow the Paro model or innovate better strategies to make their public toilets less terrifying.

Here we Go! 

The Royal Academy would like to thank Dasho Dzongrab, the Police Department in Paro, Paro Municipal Authority and Chithuen Phenday Association for coming together for a cause. Together we did it.

And I personally would like to express my greatest appreciations to my colleagues Nima Tshering, Pema Chhomo, Sonam Ura, Dr. Prabrat, Sangay Wangchuk, Deki Pem, Sonam Palden, Ben, Hemant, Penjor Ghalley, Karma Tenzin, Ram Dahal, and Tshering Nidup for job well done. You guys cleaned the hardest shit!

Following are some memories we cleaned and washed away:

Suicide on Social Media

The Bumthang double suicide incident was terribly unfortunate. It has been bothering me for days like it must be doing to many people across the country. While I don't know what to feel about the two misguided victims, my heart goes out to the parents who would be half dead in grief, and wondering where they went wrong in bringing up their children. They will often ask why their child disregarded them and left them for a stranger whom the child just knew for a year in the school. They will forever hang on to the shattered pieces of hope and seek silent answers. What was their fault?

In the midst of this painful event, the leakage of the depressing picture of the victims into the unforgiving social media must have devastated the family members. The pain of having to see it on social media, to know that everybody is watching the death of their child, will kill them piece by piece.

While I strongly condemn the sharing of the picture of the victims, and extend my appreciation to the many responsible and learned people who came forward to fight the spread of the picture that day, I think that the picture was a loud alarm clock to many strong policies that are sleeping in the pages of thick books.

There are three things that the unfortunate incident has fortunately brought to the national focus:

1. Suicide in Bhutan

Suicide among Bhutanese was long seeking attention from us but we weren't so passionate about dealing with it, at least I haven't seen anything significant happening to take care of it. Great many things must be happening in papers but this photo has finally told everybody that it's time take things beyond books and meetings.

2. Ugliness of Suicide

Suicide is murder of self, when your friend commits suicide, he kills your friend, he is a murderer, he should be hated and ridiculed but among us we share so much of compassion for the murderers, going to the extent of paying tribute, writing poems, singing songs... which I fear has glorified the idea of suicide. But the depressing picture has shown the true and ugly picture that suicide is.

3. Social Media Invasion 

The police did a good job by responded very promptly on the distribution of the picture on social media that very day, already today they have tracked down the person who has started it all. He was a health worker who was part of the investigation team. What are the charges against him? Does he even know that it was illegal?
Some of us will have the heart to know that it's wrong to do that but how many of us know that it's a punishable offence?
It's not very long since we dealt with case of sharing of homemade sex videos via mobile apps, some of which are already in the court of law. But I am still wondering how they will be charged and how that will help solve the future problems.
We are already under invasion from the social media and more than what happens in life will be reflected online. It's time we take social media seriously, define it and educate people on the netiquettes before the next big disaster happens.