Vote 2008: Vote Bhutan

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.

“Would you like a little more time? Raise your hand if you would like ten more minutes.” No hands were raised. For an hour or so the students, Michael and I had been reading through the Bhutanese party manifestos, writing sample articles comparing the parties’ positions on various issues. “Raise your hands if you’re ready to stop.” No hands were raised.

“Okay, let’s practice democracy. Please raise your hands if you’d like ten more minutes.” Ten hands maybe. “Raise your hands if you’d like to stop” None. About a third of the students had participated, but I went with it. We took a little more time.

For the first time this week, the huge task before us really hit home. People WILL vote — the king has asked them to. But this is not a society that has any tradition of voting, not even to the level of a show of hands.

Later, as I went around the room as small groups of students read their stories to each other, one read his, detailing the party’s positions on gender parity. The story was nicely composed, with one exception. The last paragraph of the story read “The key difference between the DPT and the PDP on gender parity is….” Move that to the top, I suggested. A voter who cares about gender parity will want to know that. That voter needs to make a choice, and needs to have some basis for that choice.

Choose, please. Raise your hands.

Today we drove up to Dochula pass, the first on the national highway — a road that is not quite one lane in each direction, with constant hairpin turns. This is the main road that goes from one side of the country to the other — a distance not much different from crossing the state of New York. It takes two days of driving to get to the other side of Bhutan. Here, everything is measured in “day’s journeys” Two days journeys to the east by bus. One from the south, to get your vegetables to market. One day’s walk. Some towns are so remote, election machines had to be helicoptered in. The weekly paper Kuensel has already been sending reporters out on the muddy trails with the candidates. The literal campaign trail. As we drove up to the pass today, I saw many houses far from roads, reachable only by trails and stairs. Supplies are carried in by back. This is a common way of living here. Campaigning in the U.S. seems hard, but how would our election have been different if Barack Obama and John McCain had had to walk eight hours — none of it horizontal — to meet the voters?

Okay, all, time for a history lesson, as imparted by Kinley Dorji, editor and founder of Kuensel, Bhutan’s first newspaper. Until 1961 (, Bhutan was completely cut off from in neighbors. No roads, nothing. Surrounded by the tallest mountains in the world, Bhutan lived in complete isolation from it’s much larger neighbors. The King at the time decided to slowly modernize, while taking steps to preserve Bhutan’s culture. Children were chosen at random to be sent to school in India. Kinley was one of them. It was four days walk to the border, and Kinley would take bags of rice to exchange for cash, since there was no currency in Bhutan at the time. While educating it’s youth, and slowly building roads, hospitals, and schools, Bhutanese architecture is mandatory for all buildings, and national dress (Gho, a knee-length robe for men, worn with knee socks, and Kira, long skirts for women) were required during working hours (this is true even today). After the physical infrastructure was built, the next step was communications. After attending Columbia Journalism School, Kinley returned to Bhutan in the 1980’s and founded Kuensel on a Mac. In 1999, television was allowed into Bhutan, and the BBS, Bhutanese Broadcasting System was founded. Media is still a challenge in this country, where many villages are still several days walk from the road (there is only one main route through the country,) and much of the nation remains without electricity.

Democracy is the last step. Two years ago, the king announced there would be elections, much to the dismay of the populace (so I’m told, I’ll be testing this theory) which was pretty happy with the direction the king was taking things. But, as the current issue of National Geographic puts it, “the King won the argument, as Kings tend to do.”

In December 2006, Bhutan’s fourth king abdicated to his son, and announced that with the coming elections, his son would take on a role similar to royalty in England. Local council elections were held in December 2007, the parliament will be elected March 24. The president of one of the parties will be the Prime Minister. The new government will take power in April.

As part of this, the citizenry is being taught how to vote. There have been mock elections, and even in the December council elections much had to be taught — voters would put their fingers on the faces of the candidates on the voting machines (electronic, imported from India) instead of next to them, resulting in smudges and illegibility for remaining voters. As voters as learning to vote, so the media, much of the journalists young and just out of university, are learning to cover the election — which is what brings us here. Even now the rules are being tested. For example, the debates are taped for broadcast, but reporters aren’t allowed to attended. I asked Kinley about that — and he said — “we may have to work on that.” The rules are being set, figured out, even as we speak.

I’m staying up in a hotel overlooking Thimpu, the capital of Bhutan. I’m 8000 feet up, and the Himalayas loom far above me. Down in the town, there are all sorts of buildings being constructed — new housing, schools, office buildings. The national highway is being expanded from one lane (for both directions) to do, by workers who come from India and literally break rocks by hand. Bhutan is literally a nation under construction.

I am in Calcutta, India. Okay, I’m just on the tarmac, waiting for the plane to take off for Paro, Bhutan, but it doesn’t feel so different from being at the Orlando-Sanford airport, between Rudy Giuliani and John McCain rallies, on the way to leaving for Miami for yet another rally. The smell of jet fumes is pretty much the same.

Last night I overnighted in Bangkok, Thailand. That WAS much better than an unexpected layover near Chicago O’Hare last December. Rides from both airports took about 20 minutes, but in Chicago I dodged snowflakes before collapsing for six hours of rest. At least in Bangkok I could walk out into the warm evening, inhaling a mixture of orchids and car fumes and cooking scents from a myriad of street vendors selling everything from noodle soup to whole grilled fish (made on hibachis, before my eyes), to fried larvae. Tables were laid out with little bags of all the ingredients that go into Thai food – the fresh peppers, the dried ones, the cilantro, the garlic. I was in a middle class Thai neighborhood, where families were gathering to shop and eat at tables right on the sidewalks. I ate, too. A squid salad covered with a truly fiery fresh green pepper sauce, and some batter-fried fried shrimps and vegetables (neither of which I’d eaten before) washed down with a lot of cold sing-ha beer, which was served to us, decanted into a tin bucket, and then poured into glasses at the table. No one at the restaurant spoke one word of English, and the few words of Thai I knew from a 1993 trip completely eluded me. I ordered by pointing, and hoping.

It felt nice to be somewhere with a sense of place. This was Thailand – complete with colorful little open vans and pink buses decorated with flowers and filled with commuters. I was absolutely sure where I was. Not like the last night I spent with the Rudy Giuliani campaign in a hotel modeled after a Tuscan village in Orlando.

My training partner, Michael Putzel, formerly of the AP and the Boston Globe, met me in the hotel lobby at 4:30 am this morning (which was actually 4:30 pm Friday, back at home, so it felt okay) for the ride back to the airport. In the departure lounge, we watched the BBC coverage of the Clinton-Obama date as a small clatch of fellow travelers – and Indian American from Marlboro, New Jersey on his way to Bangladesh, and an Indian casino magnate, discussed the chances of either Democrat’s winning in November. (They didn’t think they were high.)

We take off soon for Bhutan. Now, it is 8:36 in the morning. I am in a completely different kind of a time zone – 1 ½ hours behind Bangkok. More later.