Some years ago, the visiting American HVO doctors befriended a young man who was about to start a program in Livestock Management. They sent him some money via the June HVO volunteer, and she didn't have time to complete all of the transaction and gave me the remaining banknote along with an explanation that he might call for it sometime during the month. Sure enough, we got a telephone call this week, from a very polite but insistent young man that he would like to come visit. He arrived on a Friday afternoon with packs of banana gum for the children and stayed most of the evening, making polite conversation. He has finished his program and is starting the orientation for his new job, which will be as an Assistant Livestock Extension Officer in the Wangdi area, visiting farmers and helping them with their pasture and livestock development, and helping to staff the veterinary clinic in that area. He wishes he could get a foreign veterinary degree so he could move up in the ranks faster, but meantime, at 23, he makes do with his small stipend. By the time he leaves (with affectionate tight hugs all around for each one of us) he has talked us into going with him on Sunday to a nearby monastery to which we have never been, and then he calls to confirm and re-confirm that appointment no less than 5 times between Friday night and Sunday morning. Plus two emails, each of which reads:
hello to u r family, I am Dawa Tshering to write u. I am writng to check u Id is write or not. I am happy to meet your family. And we will have our track tommarow after lunch. Dawa Tshering Bhutan
Such is the rapidity with which people here can make connections that would seem forward in the US. On Sunday afternoon, then, we set off to hire a cab to drive us to the small town we saw on the way to Cheri, called Dechhenchoeling. Don sits in front with Jacob on his lap, I have Halle on my lap in the back, and Dawa puts Thompson (!) on his lap on the way there. The cab driver puts on a CD of music in Dzongkha. Some have a Beach-Boy beat, but one crooning tune Dawa explains is a song about how life is full of suffering, but that all this will pass. The cab drives us all the way to the monastery on a twisty asphalt road - it is called Dechhen Phu ("Foo") and turns out to be one of the royal monasteries, a very old one that has important associations with the medieval battles with Tibet. It has a tall central tower with tapered walls, painted brick red, and a collection of very colorful chickens wandering its grounds. The attitude is festive because of the auspicious holiday (Buddha's first sermon, and a day off work for most people); picnickers walking on the road and at the monastery dressed in their finest. We have no permit to go inside, so we plan to amuse ourselves with chicken-watching, but Dawa Tshering takes the initiative to ask the head abbot if we may enter and we are allowed to do so, which is a special pleasure.
The rest of the afternoon is spent strolling down from Dechhen Phu to the town, stopping for some refreshments, hailing a cab back to Thimphu and watching the tail end of a soccer (here, football) match on the national stadium field between Royal Army and the Simtokha team on the peanut-shell strewn cement stadium bleachers. By Tuesday Dawa Tshering will be back in his home posting of Wangdi, where we are planning to go for the weekend next week, and so we arrange to meet him next Sunday for more sightseeing. As we are walking through Thimphu Halle doesn't want to hold my hand, or Don's, but "our new friend's."
