Toil and more toil

From Jay:

There are a million stories to tell, and I think we are both anxious to write and communicate more, but between the logistical challenges of living here and actually doing the work, I find myself with a fraction of the time I had expected to have to reflect and write. But I want to share what is happening in our home life here.

We live in Paro Town, and need to make our way up the mountain the days that I teach or one of us otherwise needs to be on campus, on a half-hour long drive on a windy mountain road, 16 km and 2000 foot climb. But the stress of securing rides was manageable because we had a pleasant spot to come back to in Paro.

About a month after settling in here in our comfortable place, (christened Buddy’s House now, after our local Paro-dog), the vacant lot next to us that once hosted Buddy basking on top of his big pile of sand, and periodic wandering cows, and our view of the mountains to the south, exploded into an intense construction project ten feet or less from our windows.

The project is remarkable in many ways for us, beyond the severe aggravation of the project itself. Much of the intense physical labor in this country is done by crews of temporary laborers from India; mostly Bengali, according to one of my students.

Like most construction sites you will see in Bhutan, ours includes, at the back of the site (that is, our side yard), shacks that house the workers so they can work-sleep-work-sleep 6 ½ days a week. For us the day starts with one poor soul hawking up the night’s gunk from his lungs outside our window at 6:00 am; active work goes from 8:00 until 8:00 at night or later, working under spotlights.

We are pissed off at the landlord, who first acted surprised this was happening; that our quiet little house had abruptly changed to a place that is rarely possible to work in. But it is clear her family was and is fully aware of it, and she is not holding the school to the lease, so we are now planning to move up the mountain to the JSW campus.

In the meantime, we have watched this project evolve daily, pissed at the landlord but with sympathy, appreciation, and no resentment for the poor souls for whom this toil makes sense in their lives. Living far away from home and working like donkeys because, apparently, life at home is much harder. Intellectually, I have been well aware of migrant guest labor all over the globe, but I’ve never rubbed elbows daily with the people who have chosen this life. Their struggle makes our logistical “struggles” here seem puny, but this is the way of the world, and we all know it. Our privilege comes from others’ toil.

Our house at the back

These folks first cleared the lot, and then one day unloaded 10 metric tons (or was it 20??), of rebar. By hand. Because all the roads are so mountainous, there are no long truck-beds like in the US, so the 50 or 60 foot lengths of 1 ½ inch rebar were folded in half. After unloading this mammoth amount of steel, these guys then proceeded to unbend rebar by hand. Using sheer muscle applied to a wooden apparatus that is hard to describe, it's a whole different story that I will spare you for now.

We came home one day to find a backhoe on site and large, deep trenches dug through most of the site. The guys then proceeded to create stone foundation pads by smashing boulders that were dug up by the backhoe, with sledgehammers. They worked those sledgehammers nearly every day for a week, breaking rocks starting in the morning on into the evening long past dark. They then fitted the broken rocks together, flat sides up, to form perfect squares that are roughly flush across the top.

Then came the concrete "pours". Concrete was mixed and humped from the front of the lot down into the hole by the workers using slings, one worker on each end, to pour onto the rock squares to make remarkably even concrete pads. Then we watched as these guys carried the huge steel pillars, that they had crafted by hand from the rebar, down into the hole and hoisted them up by hand. These must weigh thousands of pounds. I have no idea. 

All over Paro, construction like this is racing along to get a firm footing before the rainy season, and there is not a crane of any size in the town.

I know this project will go on for a lot longer, but hopefully soon we can step away from the constant racket, and just check in when we come down to town to shop at the market. But it's also the sad reminder that some of us win the Birthplace Lottery, and some don’t. That my being born in Mt. Vernon, Ohio, USA, rather than Bengali in India, has made a world of difference in my life and the lives of my family.

We always say hello and admire their work when we go past as we leave or return, often taking pictures, as are posted here. As we set out the other day, the crew was relaxing for a moment, for once, in the pit in ground. As we snapped a few pictures of the progress they had made hauling these huge columns of rebar up to vertical positions, they saw us and enthusiastically invited us to come down into their work site.

We have little common language, but it was clear to them that we are enormously impressed with their labors, and the remarkable results of the hard work. It was equally clear to us how proud they are of that work. So we spent some time snapping photos of each other, some of the workers also pulling out their phones to get pictures with us in the middle of their work site.

We do hope to move up to campus this week, into a residential assistant suite in one of the student dorms, which will dramatically change our lives: no easy walk to the market, but no hassle of commuting and chasing rides up to campus, and we will be around the students all week, which will be great. But I think our neighborhood work crew will be sorry for us to go.