Our guide, Pema, tells us of his own experience. He is 28 and has a sought-after job as a tourism guide, specializing in trekking. His parents live east of Thimphu in a small village which is four days' walk from a road. They grow chilies, rice, and maize as cash crops, which Pema takes south to India to sell.

High above the river

His father hunts deer and bears with a bamboo bow and arrow; his mother weaves and works the fields. As subsistence farmers, they have pigs, chickens, and sheep, with horses for load-carrying and oxen for ploughing.

When Pema was 13 an uncle decided he had potential and sent him away to school. He finished with good grades at the age of 22. Declining the chance to study further in India, he got a job in order to share his good fortune and put his two brothers and sister through school.

They must live away from home to study, and boarding fees at a government school amount to 100 kilograms of rice a year. Pema insists that his siblings return home to help the parents at harvest time and during school holidays, but they are becoming more reluctant.

The generation gap is widening — his sister is not interested in learning to weave and cannot understand why her mother spurns modern medicines. Pema speaks all but two of Bhutan's 16 languages, but his parents converse only in their local dialect.

I asked Pema if education was undermining the Bhutanese way of life and the national adherence to religion."No," he answered, slightly puzzled. "Buddhism is in the soul of almost every Bhutanese man and woman, and learning about the rest of the world doesn't change that." He did concede that it will become harder to persuade graduates to return to the hardship of life in the hills; and then who will plough the fields, and grow the grain?

Move on to The Divine Madman

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