Source: Kuensel
By Kencho Wangdi
One out of four Bhutanese live in poverty. While covering the elections, Kuensel’s chief reporter came across some of them.
 |
| Living off the land: A life of relentless toil |
Sangay, 57, didn’t have to hear the thunder – he could see a gray mass of clouds stalking the western horizon. He eyed the clouds in the way all farmers do. Too much rain would ruin his maize seedlings, too little would parch and stunt them.
Sangay is a resident of Pangthang, a hamlet at the bottom of one of Pemagatshel’s perpendicular ridges. It’s a six-hour walk from a road at the hilltop. I was in Pangthang to gauge the political leanings of the inhabitants after a party leader had campaigned there a day or two ago. But, on that day, politics was the last thing on Sangay’s mind. He was clearing an area of weeds and the sudden change of colour in the sky had hastened his pace.
His fingers were raw from working in the farm. They looked as rough as splintered wood. His skin had withered and cracked from successive seasons of sun and rain. His spade looked as old as himself – handle worn to a pinpoint from years of use and steel blade so unevenly worn that it had teeth.
Sangay’s house was a thatched adobe hut, a two-room structure of pine branches daubed with mud on a pair of oak stilts. The interior was a rich dark patina, the result of years of absorbing smoke and sweat and dirt.
Outside it rained. Mercifully it was not a torrent. Sangay’s maize would be safe. The steady beat of water on his wooden roof, however, sought cracks and in places it sneaked inside in precise streams drilling through rotting floors. During heavy rains, Sangay said, lightning flashes filled his room and thunder shook the house.
“Politicians have come and gone promising us the stars,” said Sangay. Sugar is a luxury and, in spite of its shortage in the house, I was served a tea so sweet I felt my teeth were going to fall out. “My wish is that my grandchildren do not suffer like me. All I pray for is a road for them.”
Sangay’s poverty is tragic because of the element of crushed potential present. His village is rich in minerals and cash crops, including soya beans and linseed. But the absence of a road has destroyed the promise. Horses as transportation are expensive and hardly pay for the backbreaking labour.
One party leader discovered the difficulties of an absence of roads in Pemagatshel the hard way, when he was forced to cross a waist-deep river to reach Yechen near Pangthang. As he clung to the arms of party workers, struggling to find a foothold on the riverbed, farmers looked on with horror from the other side. When he left the next morning, the politician told them: “When I visit you next time, I’ll drive and come, okay?”
There are many places like Pangthang and numerous farmers like Sangay in the East. Mainly in Pemagatshel, and especially in Zhemgang. Places there sit outside one’s antenna, as though they were distant mythical regions on a medieval map. Tiny pockets of settlements scattered thinly across the face of ridges. To reach them, one has to walk through forests that sweep over endless stretches across the rise and fall of the region’s steep terrain. There is a place called ‘Bardo’ in Zhemgang, whose name explains itself.
During the campaigns, a politician’s visit to these villages injected excitement in what is, a farmer said, a prolonged sameness that makes up the humdrum of a farmer’s life. Most are happy to accommodate you in their homes.
At night, when you crawl into bed on the rigid floor, you hear nothing but the whisper of people in the house, fading to the click of night bugs and the distant bark of a deer. From window cracks, you can see the maize shoots under the glow of the moon. From planting to picking, a Zhemgang farmer said, it was the only thing they noticed changing in their villages. Cell by cell, it climbed, a fraction of an inch a day, until it topped out in the June sun.
They ate meagre rations, almost exclusively maize and wheat. From the outside, they seemed content. In some ways, while farmers did not have TV sets, as did their urban brethren in the capital and towns, they were not in all ways more deprived. All they knew was poverty. Everyone they knew was poor. Hundreds of others were in the same predicament. They had nothing else to compare themselves to. There was no ever-present standard of acquisition against which to measure their status. It was a natural state and therefore one to which no stigma was attached.
But, every time they visited the towns, they knew, a farmer said, that they had failed in the game of life. They were reminded of it whenever they walked to town and watched TV in a restaurant.
Rain in summer is the most common form of precipitation in Zhemgang. During heavy onslaughts, the land is disoriented and muddy. The rain drags with it large swathes of fertile land and with it huge boulders. Creeks turn into swollen furies. From the time they are born, Nado said, farmers like him have found themselves, while returning home from errands, stranded on the other side, unable to cross the river. A few have even died trying to brave a crossing, said Nado. Most, however, camp until the river abates.
But for all the rain from heaven, drinking water was a serious problem. In Radhi, Zhemgang, farmers walked about 1-2 hours to fetch water from a stream. Government-supplied water taps have long since stopped working. “I want to request the politicians to give my village safe drinking water, ” said Tshering Wangdi, 21, from Radhi, studying in Zhemgang High School, whom I met on my way to Nimshong.
Wild animals also made their lives difficult. Boars waited for the crops to ripen, then emerged from their forests to gobble up, sometimes, a field-full at night. The farmers usually get no compensation. They build primitive watchtowers near the crops, and arrange rotas of torch-armed men to guard the ripening fields through the night, but nothing works well, farmers say.
Many inhabitants, unable to take the hardship any longer, have quit the place and taken up the government offer to resettle elsewhere. According to the National Assembly member from Upper Kheng, Tshering Dorji, the exodus ran into several thousands. Many houses were either crumbling or reduced to rubble.
Still, most persevere, if only to stare at hands worn from a lifetime of labour. A woman worked for her parents until some time into her teens, when she had to do what she could to find a man, usually a farmer, whom she could bear serving as wife, and then went to work for her new husband. Some, however, dream of breaking free. In the process, they fall prey to smooth-talking men on official tours, who promise marriage and an easy life in the city. As a result, there are many single mothers in the villages.
According to a Nimshong farmer, rural women, like others, quickly find out that, to escape from a world that has long and successfully conspired against them, was nothing but a dream.