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Bhutanese Refugees Use Bronx as Stop on Way to New Lives
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January 1, 2011. But now they are on the move again. In the year since The New York Times profiled the building and the eight Bhutanese families who were living there, four of the families have left for other states — Virginia, Pennsylvania, Vermont and North Carolina — and most members of a fifth have moved to Albany. “It’s a tough decision, trying to move from one place to another,” said T. P. Mishra, 26, who spent much of his life in a refugee camp in Nepal before coming to New York in July 2009, and is now living in a quiet suburb of Raleigh, N.C. “But obviously when you compare the life, it’s better.”
Shedding Light on the Last Shangri La
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December 19, 2010: Clutching his application to resettle in the United States, Thakur Prasad Mishra hesitated at the door of the UN field office in southeastern Nepal.The fight to uncensor Bhutan's media had left Mishra - founder of the first newspaper dedicated to the 108,000 displaced Lhotshampas, Nepali-speakers from Bhutan - torn between his growing audience of refugees in Nepal and the security and opportunity for a normal life in the United States. But with communist militias fracturing civility in the refugees' community, he realized resettlement was his only option.
The Kingdom of Bhutan has remained largely isolated from the outside world for centuries, but this tiny Himalayan nation has garnered international attention recently for modernizing to the beat of its own drum. In an attempt to preserve national heritage, the government banned television and the internet until 1999, making Bhutan one of the last countries to introduce the TV. Long a nation run by Buddhist monks and monarchical families, it wasn’t until March 2008 that the ruling King Jigme Singye Wangchuck abruptly stepped down to make way for democracy.
Now officially plugged into the internet and under a functioning democracy, Bhutan is posed to integrate itself with the rest of the world. Even the newly revised constitution is modern in tone, guaranteeing many of the same rights that are found in democracies across the globe. But this predominantly Buddhist country is having trouble acting according to its own constitution when it comes to religious freedom, and Bhutanese Christians are suffering as a result.
Prem Singh Gurung's sentence was announced on October 6, four months after he hauled a generator and projector up to two villages, both of which are without electricity and located more than a day's walk from the nearest road. According to Kuensel, the government-run newspaper of Bhutan, Gurung showed Nepali movies between each of which was a short clip about Jesus Christ.
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