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On the second to last day of the trainings, we took the class to the bus station and the vegetable market to talk to voters. We’d been expecting to hear some reticence about participating in the elections (after all, the monarchy has worked pretty well), but once again, we learned that the voters will always surprise you. In the ticket office, voters were booking passage to go to their villages to vote March 24. In the vegetable market, a woman who works seven days a week for 3000 Nu a month (less than $1000) says she WILL vote. A set of chili vendors crowded around a reporter from the BBS, pouring out tales of the campaign in their villages. The students were surprised, and thrilled. They’d expected voters not to want to talk, but the opposite was true. They found dozens of interesting stories.

Two days later, on my way out of Bhutan, I hiked up to a monastery with one of the students, a two-hour hike to an elevation of 9000 feet. While on our way down, he got a cell-phone call, telling him he’d be assigned to four constituencies in the south. He described what it would be like, hiking for hours or even a day with different candidates, his laptop tucked in his gho (the knee-length robe-like national dress the men wear), hoping to get a dial-up connection in the villages to file his stories. “I’m already planning my coverage” he told me. “Profiles, talking to villagers, finding out what the important issues are.”

With such strong media watchdogs, Bhutan is great hands.