Tuesday
After the longest trip ever to get there, we started our descent to the Paro airport in Bhutan, it was really cool to see how the pilot had to maneuver between mountains, to land, it must be really difficult or at least it looked like it, he had to make some sharp turns all while descending and then ther it was the airport.
It was incredible the architecture of the airport was typical Bhutanese, everyone we saw was wearing the traditional gho the view was incredible mountains all around, with little houses and temples popping up randomly. During entry there was a problem with my sister’s visa because her gender was “N” the guy told me to go find our travel agent (you can’t enter Bhutan unless you have a specified plan with a travel agency, I think) and so I walked all by myself past immigration, baggage claim customs up to the point where the cabs would be, found the guy with the sign that had our names on it, and then we walked back to immigration, no one stopped us, no one asked us anything. He talked to the officer, made a phone call and within 3 minutes we were good to go and drowned in apologies from them.
It’s easy to see that one of the reasons this is possible is because there are fewer people to manage, and enough well trained government officers to handle it. Maybe in this case it would seem to mean that the higher amount of government/person helped, but that of course cannot be generalized.
The drive to our airport was breathtaking; it was a unique mixture of good development and tradition keeping, a brand new road, with little traffic being cleaned by groups of people who, somehow looked happy while picking up trash from the road. Lots of family owned traditional farming on the sides of the road, and of course the mountains all around us. The river was incredibly clean, we drove by it for a really long time and it looked impeccable the whole time. Our guide told us the trip used to take 2 hours before they rebuilt the road, when they started construction the King personally visited the workers and asked them to please work on it really well and efficiently because it was really important, apparently they did so and the road was finished really quickly.
Our hotel was really nice, maybe too nice given the fact that a lot of the people’s houses are very rural and traditional, but maybe the idea behind it is “this is what we need, and this is what the tourists need”…who knows, maybe I’m just trying to justify it :p. No plastic bags in the hotel…I can’t remember any in the whole country actually, but maybe I’m just forgetting. Although they did say during one of the talks about trying to reduce the amount of plastic used.
We went to Hotel Termalinca where the talks were going on, I guess this is a good time to explain why we were here in the first place. Bhutan’s government has put in place a development measurement tool called GNH – gross national happiness – one part of this is concerned with sustainable development and policies that are in agreement with log term preservation of the environment. Both my dad and godfather have been involved in projects related to this, and so my godfather organized a fundraiser for several projects in this field, a lot of investors from the world were invited and my dad (and through him, my mom and sister and I) was invited to invest (haha, right) present the Las Gaviotas project from Colombia (look it up it’s really cool) and talk to some people to see if they can set up something similar in Bhutan, since they have a lot of pine trees.
The first event we got to see was some “hang-out time” with one of the queen mothers, there are 4 in Bhutan, the current king’s mom and her 3 sisters; they’re each in charge of one major project. She talked a lot about the building regulations and how they are some restrictions with respect to how much they need to stick to the traditional style, and how they make sure they’re earthquake proof, and other things.
She told us about this monument that she was in charge of, the 108 stupas in 2003 after a lot of attempts at peaceful talks, the King decided they had to go to war in the North of Bhutan. In her words, the King is not a King to sit in his office and direct direct the soldiers through a telephone, but he went out there and fought among his men, everyone in the country was really worried about him, so the queen mother started a monument consisting of 108 stupas, 108 is apparently a really important number in bhuddism, to pray to the gods for his safety and that of every soldier, everyone contributed, one of the guides in our group later told us he spent 3 days helping there. The war ended in victory with 11 Bhutanese casualties, the King was safe.
The next talk was about operationalizing GNH. The reason Bhutan is special is because they are working very hard to control the way the country develops. They came up with this ideal called Gross National Happiness which ideally would be able to measure development in a more complete and accurate way than other indicators used in the world. The basic concept comes from thinking that happiness is the ultimate desire of every citizen and therefore it must be the main purpose of development. Measuring happiness seems to be thus the most appropriate way to measure development, as opposed to GDP or other methods.
It is obviously really hard to measure the happiness of a country, but they decided they would try really hard but in 2008, they finally made the transition of turning GNH from a an abstract philosophical goal to a measurable concept. This is awesome.
There are 4 pillars to GNH:
-sustainable and equitable development
-preservation and promotion of national culture
-environmental conservation
-good governance
To measure this they use 72 indicators in 9 domains, they didn’t talk about every indicator but they did focus on a few so here are some the domains and some of the indicators in each
Psychological well-being
Some of the things they measure here are stress, compassion, calmness, generosity, frustration, selfishness, jealousy, frequency of prayers and meditation, and consideration of karma and suicide, among the population.
Culture preservation and diversity
Here they try to measure how many people and how often people speak Bhutanese (this makes sense because the king decided to make English really important in schools a while ago, now 85% of the population speaks in English, the goal is 100% by 2015), how often people practice the national games (archery is the national sport…badass), discipline, knowledge/participation in national traditions and festivals.
Time use
The main idea here is that people should ideally work 8 hours, sleep 8 hours, and then have 8 hours every day of leisure time. I thought that the leisure time was too vague, I mean I guess it could go from spending time playing with your kids to waiting stuck in traffic. But they did some research and found that most people were pretty close to those 8-8-8 goals.
Community Vitality
How much help is available from your neighbors, and how safe people feel, at the homes and in the streets.
Good governance
They measure how true it is that they have freedom of speech and association, also discrimination and equal pay for equal value of work. I thought that was really interesting obviously equal pay is ridiculous, but equal pay for equal value, THAT’s where it’s at.
Education
They said they needed to live up to 2 different standards. They wanted to make sure the education the government offered was up to conventional international standards, after they made sure that was achieved, and ONLY after, they started working on living up to GNH standards. They decided they needed to introduce meditation in schools and then showed us a video of a bunch of kids saying how awesome it was and how much they liked it and thought it was a good idea…except for the last kid, who said “I think it’s stupid and boring now I’m going to go play soccer” we all laughed.
The other 3 domains were Ecology, Health, and Standard of Life.
complement to GDP and others as development indicator
They specified that the goal is to add to, and not to replace other development indicators, which are good just incomplete. For example in Japan, they said life expectancy is 90, but it’s necessary to see what kind of life people have from, say 80-90. If they’re just laying in bed being sick for 10 years that’s not development.
They also gave us an example of how they use it to make decisions. They were debating on whether to have Bhutan join the WTO, initially and after hearing from a lot of them 19 of the ministers were for and 5 against. Then they examined it using GNH criteria, in short, they saw that it would raise stress, and material well being, as well as decrese equality, so the votes changed to 19 against and 5 for.
In 1961 the government had to undertake ventures because the private sector was too weak to do it, but then between 1982 and 1992 they went through a lot of privatization. Debt is about 60% of GDP, and the role of the government is seen, as much as possible, as a policymaker and regulator, not as a participant in the market. Unemployment is a little under 4%, and also they have policies to encourage the added value to natural resources, i.e. not dig and sell for other countries to process, but have the process happen in Bhutan.
Whenever the Government undertakes projects that have to use the land of some citizens, the idea is to provide to every family affected 1 job guaranteed plus 10000 units worth (about 400 dollars a year)
The last thing in the guy’s presentation was some words from Buddha
Buddha said:
Never commit wrong doings
Accumulate good
Watch out for your mind (educate yourself, and don’t let people corrupt you)
Another interesting thing to mention is how people feel about the government in Bhutan, the 4th king (the current is his son, the 5th) was apparently really awesome, every time he comes up in conversation you can almost see the love and respect in everyone’s face, he’s the one who came up with GNH, and created the parliament. I heard at some point that the royal family is extremely rich, but there is no tax money that goes to them, still they spend huge amounts investing in projects and works for the people and the country.
That evening we had dinner at a hotel with all the people in the event, they hired some local artisans to sell their stuff and to work in front of everyone, it was really cool. The food was delicious but really spicy, so my parents couldn’t enjoy it a lot.
Then…bedtime J
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