It’s Teacher’s Day at Beldangi refugee camp. Students at Tri Ratna Secondary School are thanking their teachers with speeches, songs, and folk dances on a bamboo stage decorated with their mothers’ saris.
This has been a yearly tradition since the school opened in 1992, when the refugees had just arrived and classes were held in an empty field. Now, they study in a modest complex of bamboo classrooms that even has a science lab and small teachers’ lounge. But there aren’t many students left. The school’s principal, Purna Gurung, says the student body has dropped from nearly 3,000 to fewer than 200 as kids leave the camp and resettle in new countries. But he has no plans to leave himself.
“I have chosen to be here, longing for repatriation to Bhutan, my own country,” Gurung says.
Principal Purna Gurung, left, and one of his teachers at Tri Ratna Secondary School at the Beldangi refugee camp.
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Salim Ali/PRI
Fleeing ethnic cleansing, finding new homes in third countries
In the 1990s, people in Nepal like Gurung, with certain ethnic backgrounds, were pushed out of the country through a severe campaign to retain Bhutanese national identity. Around 108,000 people moved through India to Nepal, where camps were eventually established. In 2007, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, started accepting applications for moves to third countries. After almost a decade of the resettlement program, more than 105,000 Bhutanese refugees have moved abroad. The vast majority have started new lives in the United States.
With about 90 percent of the refugees now abroad, the Bhutanese program is actually a huge success, as far as refugee resettlement goes. More often, refugees never get the option to move. According to Kevin Allen, the Kathmandu-based representative of the UN refugee agency, global displacement has now reached World War II levels. And fewer than 1 percent of refugees typically find safe homes in new countries.
“There are currently 65 million people forcibly displaced, it’s in the news, the Syria situation, South Sudan, Somalia, etc., and so the international community is hard pressed to meet needs globally,” Allen says.
The Bhutanese refugees were given until Nov. 15 of this year to apply to go abroad. By the end of the year, UNHCR will stop forwarding applications for resettlement. Allen predicts there will be about 10,000 people left here at the end.
One of the last to leave will be 29-year-old teacher Sita Adhikari.
Adhikari teaches high school math in the camp and makes $7 a month. She actually has a master’s degree in humanities. But when the camp’s last math teacher moved to the US, she was the most qualified person to take over.
Back in her bamboo hut, she teaches herself the lessons while trying to keep her young kids occupied enough to ignore the oppressive heat and mosquitoes. A small fan quietly fights back in the corner, but sweat trickles with any movement. When a problem stumps her, she texts her brother for help. He used to teach math in the camp too, but resettled to Rochester, New York, in 2008. Soon she’ll join him.
“I want to experience life and I want to provide my children more facilities than I used to have because I have taken much struggle in life now,” Adhikari says.
Sita Adhikari with children at a refugee camp, where she also teaches high school math.
Credit:
Salim Ali/PRI
Some refugees don't want to be resettled
Adhikari says she’s late to apply for resettlement because her recent divorce has complicated her application. But some of her neighbors are still here because they don’t actually want to move. Some think they’ll be given land in the area if they stay.
“Some want to return back to Bhutan also. There are people. There is one grandfather there. He wants to move back to Bhutan.”
But Adhikari knows this is unlikely. She says people have been talking about moving back to Bhutan since the ’90s, but it hasn’t happened. One of these people holding out for return was Adhikari’s own primary school teacher, Dhanman Khadka, who came to her hut to talk.
Khadka has been teaching primary school in the camp since 1994 and was adamant against resettling; so much so that his wife and son moved to Australia without him in 2012. They haven’t spoken since. But now 64 and living alone, he’s resigned himself. Last March, Khadka applied for resettlement to Dallas, where his daughter lives.
“What to do — so many relatives are there. Better to go there, our life is better than here,” he says.
Khadka’s friend, 70-year-old Dal Bahadur Bista, disagrees.
“I’m not going. I’m staying here.”
Dal Bahadur Bista makes a cradle out of bamboo.
Credit:
Salim Ali/PRI
Bista has lived in the camp for 24 years. He still considers Bhutan, where he had to abandon his house and fields of cardamom and orange trees, home.
“I have really really big hopes that I could be back one day in my land in Bhutan, and if not, I’d like to die here in this land, but I won’t go to a third country. At least I can die here in peace in this camp.”
Bista sits outside his hut sweating over bamboo he’s fashioning into a baby cradle. Refugees aren’t legally allowed to work in Nepal, but the informal economy is flush with their labor. He sells his bamboo crafts both in the camp and to locals outside, but he knows these skills won’t translate well in the West.
