Explorations

There are many serious issues to reflect on in this blog. But it is also fun and so interesting to ruminate on the everyday experiences, including what it was like living on campus, and how we kept our physical environment clean and healthy.  We did a good job of figuring out how to feed ourselves, which was no small task, but it turned out our biggest challenge was being able to clean our clothes.   I will never again take my washing machine for granted.  We could hire someone to do our wash for us, as the two other short-term Fulbrighters did. But we don’t mind doing our own laundry, and quite honestly, like having control over what happens to our clothes. Being at the laundry was also a great opportunity to have unplanned meetings with students – I have had some of my best conversations with students, and learned so many things, hanging out by the washing machines. It also gives us a window onto their living conditions.    The campus "laundry facility" serves...

More thoughts from Jay: A courtroom in Wangdue-Phodrang district court. The masks, based in a mythology, roughly represent the defense side in white, the evil dark side prosecution, and the judge in the middle. Being back in Seattle has given us a little bit of time and space to think about JSW and our experiences in Bhutan. For much of the time we were there, my perspective on Bhutan’s legal system was based on my experience at JSW, where many faculty do not actually have law degrees, and of those, very few have any experience practicing law. It was not easy to learn what the real-life practice of law was like for attorneys in court. One of the few ways students get practical exposure is through clinics taught by faculty with legal experience, including our colleague Prof. Dema Lham, who has taught the popular Human Dignity Clinic for several years. Through Dema, I was able to build a relationship with the Bhutan National Law Institute (BNLI), the government agency whose mission is ju...

Every year in the fall, there is a day of celebration called the Blessed Rainy Day, marking the end of the rainy season. This year it was Spetmeber 23, and the students planned to have a khuru tournament to celebrate. Khuru is a traditional Bhutanese game, like lawn darts, with small targets spaced 20  meters  or more (60+ feet) apart. It is a tamer version of the traditional archery that is very common. (The movie  “Travelers and Magicians”  opens up with a great scene of traditional Bhutanese archery, including the crazy taunting that happens in front of the target, which unfortunately leads to many injuries, or worse).    Come Blessed Rainy Day, however, the students had to cancel their plans because it was… too rainy! So they pushed it back a few weeks, until they were sure it would be a dry day.   One Sunday in mid-October, we went out for a walk only to find khuru had taken over much of the parking lot next to the library. This area has been de...

“Everyone is going to Australia.” I hear this from so many people, so often. Colleagues at school, people in town, taxi drivers, officials, everyone knows a lot of people who have left the country. Even we know people who have left the country, or have tried to leave, or are waiting to leave, or are planning to leave.  The law school is not immune to this exodus. In the year after the campus moved to its permanent location in Pangbisa, the staff lost 20 people - out of a total staff of 60. And while much of that can be attributed to the fact that  a lot of people didn’t want to commute to Pangbisa from Thimphu, or move to Paro, the astonishing stat was that 14 out of those 20 people left for Australia.   Australia has long been where many Bhutanese have gone for school or to work. Some people also have gone to Canada and the UK, and to a lesser degree, the US. But Australia now has a large Bhutanese community, many there permanently, which draws more people to settle. I r...

After spending nearly a week doing trainings in Punakha, in the central part of the country,  with our friend and colleague David,   we were all quite happy for the chance to take a quick trip to the Pobjikha valley. At over 9,000 ft, the  valley  is a rare high altitude wetland, and winter home to the globally threatened black necked cranes. We got there early enough to take a walk through the woods and farms bordering the valley, trying to glimpse any of the 13 cranes that had arrived in the valley the previous week. This group apparently was the advanced guard for the winter migration. The cranes are the subject of great scrutiny - they summer in the Tibetan plateau and winter mostly in Bhutan, the Pobjikha valley being the largest of several areas they inhabit. Official counts from earlier years pegged the number at about 300 spending the winter; there are only several thousand of them on the planet, threatened primarily by loss of habitat. Most of Bhut...