Explorations

From Jay, on teaching aspiring lawyers: I think many of our previous writings have included bits and pieces of what I am about to write here, but I wanted to put it all together into a picture that is starting to come into focus for me and my work.  The  longer we are here the more complex our take on things, and the more challenging it is to blog about it. We haven’t spent much time blogging about the Big Picture here, but it is always on our minds as we teach young, very smart, enthusiastic students, who listen to tales about social change movements in the US and elsewhere, and consider what that all means to them here in Bhutan, a place that is still scrambling to catch up to the rest of the world. Our students are all very smart, but the country has been very isolated for centuries.   First, a little bit of background.    Bhutan is small—maybe around 180 miles east to west, and 90 miles from the north border with China to the southern border with several Ind...

In Buddhist tradition, every new building needs to be blessed before it is inhabited. But even though JSW’s new campus officially opened about a year and a half ago, the school has not had a consecration ceremony yet, though there has been a desire and plan to do so as soon as feasible. So the blessing ceremony, or the Rabney, is now scheduled to happen on October 5, and there has been a literal mountain of preparations happening in anticipation of what is turning out to be a ginormous celebration. The law school has been the provenance of the Princess, Her Royal Highness, who is the president of the school. She was commissioned to take on this project by her brother, the Fifth King, nearly 13 years ago, and so the consecration, or inauguration as she refers to it, is a kind of coming out party, not just for the school, but for HRH as well. It is her gift to her father, the Fourth King, whose appearance at such an event is apparently very rare. So we will have not just the Princess and...

A few weeks ago, we decided to make a trip to the Haa valley, just west of Paro. Our friend David’s partner Britane was here for a month, and it was going to be her last weekend, so we thought we’d all visit this part of Bhutan that none of us had been to, even though it is only a 2-hour or so drive from Paro.   As foreigners, we are not able to travel beyond the Paro and Thimphu districts without a permit. So we asked the faculty secretary to apply for the route permit for us, which is usually a simple process. Two days before we were planning to go, she told us that she had been told not to submit the application if we did not have a Bhutanese traveling with us. It was not clear whether she had been told this by the law school administration, or by Bhutan immigration authorities.    We are not sure why, but we assume that we were denied traveling there by ourselves because the Haa valley is on the western border of Bhutan, which makes it a very strategic location. ...

The last few weeks have been a whirl, bit by bit getting settled, oriented, acclimated, and verified. We are back living on campus, with its plusses and minuses. We spent three days in Thimphu last week doing the immigration dance once again, because our work permits from last semester expired before we returned, because we had not extended them before we left, because we were not clear that we were coming back. So we had to go through that all over again, and I was astonished that it was even more complicated and exhausting than the last time. I still feel a little traumatized by it all! I may write more about that at some point, but the bottom line is that we are thankfully visaed and permitted again. Phew! I thought I'd just share some photos for now, to catch up a bit on what we've been up to. Most days we walk up the hill from the law school into Pangbisa, the small settlement up the hill, mostly for the exercise and acclimatizing, but also to do some bird-watching, stare ...

The landscape of Bhutan is like a crumpled piece of paper, full of folds and ripples and ridges and dips. The hiking we have done through Bhutan's valleys gives a good sense of the small features of this dramatic landscape, but flying over the top of it is just an astonishing perspective of valleys nested in valleys defined by steep folds. The first time we flew into Paro, the weather was clear and we could easily see the path the plane took, weaving up narrow valleys and alongside steep slopes that seemed not far enough from the tips of the plane’s wings. It was dramatic and somewhat intimidating; the Paro airport is apparently one of the most difficult in the world to fly in and out of. I believe it. Supposedly there are just a handful of pilots who are certified to fly here.   Flying in this time, we were in the fog and clouds for much of the flight from Bangkok. There was not much to see, just a gray shroud obscuring the ground. When we were close to Paro, the pilot announced t...