Walking tall

January 16, 2010Posted inPoverty, Villages
Dramekha, Ngatsena and Thangdokha are three villages perched precariously on the steep slopes of a mountain opposite Dorokha, Denchukha and Dumtoe. Dramekha, Ngatsena and Thangdokha were, until recently, part of Mayona Gewog under Samtse. In 2007, these three villages and several equally remote villages of Dumtoe (Samtse) and Samar (Haa) were combined to form the kingdom’s newest gewog, Gakiling. Dramekha, Ngatsena and Thangdokha hold the disagreeable distinction of being among the poorest villages in Bhutan. They also hold the most unfortunate record of never having had a dzongdag visit them. That’s correct: no dzongdag has ever visited these villages,…

More food for thought

October 9, 2009Posted inHealth, Poverty
Sangay made three critical observations to my last entry. Most of you would already know that I try not to reply to criticism, especially those targeted at me. But Sangay’s comments are constructive. So they deserve serious consideration. First, Sangay cautioned: “… don’t just add up those figures – I am pretty sure that these are overlapping figures.” Sangay may be correct. In fact, Ken Shulman, a friend and journalist in America, also made a similar comment in my Facebook profile. But look at the numbers again: 37% of our children are stunting; 4.6% are wasting; and 11.1% are…

Food for thought

October 7, 2009Posted inPoverty, Youth
I’m still reeling from the announcement in the Annual Health Bulletin that 37% of our children are stunting, that 4.6% of them are wasting, and that 11.1% are underweight. That means that 52.7% of our children are under nourished. In other words, more than half our children do not have enough to eat. Wasting, also called acute malnutrition, causes body fat and tissue to “waste” away, or to degenerate. And it is generally caused by extreme hunger, i.e., famine. So, even as I write this entry, one in every twenty children may be coping with famine. Stunting or chronic…

Poor villages

July 25, 2009Posted inPoverty, Villages
Our government estimates that 23.3% of our population live in poverty. And that the incidence of poverty in our villages is significantly higher than in our towns. In fact, the poverty rate in rural Bhutan is 30.9%. That is, almost one in every three of our villagers lives below the poverty line. Compare this to the urban poverty rate of just 1.7%, and it becomes clear that our villages need serious and immediate attention. But, the amount of money allocated to local governments, and hence to rural Bhutan, for this financial year, again, is negligible. Only 22.8% of the…