YOLO Journal Issue 12 - Flipbook - Page 74
It was fate that took us to Bhutan
for the first time nearly 20 years ago.
Michael’s father had a friend who was
a Bhutanese emissary to the UN. The
emissary offered Michael’s father a
trip as a thank you for legal advice; for
various reasons, we went instead.
Excited to explore a part of the
world that looms large in the global
imagination, yet so few people have
the possibility to visit, we were up for
the adventure. We had seen images of a
particular monastery of note we hoped
to visit. Unbeknownst to us, this was
not a simple request. The emissary
worked diligently to make it possible.
The day we were to depart, we were
met by a caravan of monks and donkeys
in the valley of Punakha to carry the
provisions of butter and rice we were
told to bring with us. And thus began
our journey.
This was October, the end of
monsoon season, where everything
is sodden from months of drenching
weather. We hiked a path so deep with
mud it felt comical at times. Higher
and higher we climbed. Eventually, we
were at such an elevation the landscape
literally changed to a cloud forest, the
path dense with rhododendron and
old-growth trees bursting with bromeliads and orchids. It was wildly vibrant
and mesmerizing, as if we were crossing
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the threshold to another dimension.
Nearly eight hours later, exhausted and
covered in leech bites, we pierced the
cloud cover and spotted a monastery up
on a high ridge.
As we approached, we saw the
building was utterly dilapidated—
spectacularly beautiful in its dereliction,
but very definitely on the brink of ruin.
It was filled with barefooted children
wearing monks’ red robes. We soon
learned this was a monastic school,
a shedra, for children, many of them
orphaned. There was no head teacher
or any adults in sight, just a few teenage
monks who seemed to be the authority
figures.
We thought perhaps there had been
some kind of mistake. It didn’t look like
what we had expected from the photos
we had seen. Even our guide had never
seen this place, let alone visited before.
If there had been a mistake, there was
no way of knowing how or why, and
clearly at this point, there was nothing
we could do about it.
We did our best to settle in. The
young monks hung our sopping clothes
on a line strung from the monastery
stupa and gave us dry wool robes to
wear. We sat down to eat with them
in a metal shed alongside the donkeys
and dogs. There was no running water.
The boys would get fresh water from a •
