Care across Distance: Ethnographic Explorations of Aging and Migration

PART I

Materialities and Technologies of Care across Distance

1.  RECALIBRATING CARE

Newly Resettled Nepali-Bhutanese Refugees in Upstate New York

Retika Desai

DHANA¹ AND PHUL-MAYA WERE RELOCATED to the United States in February 2015 as part of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) resettlement program responsible for resettling approximately 108 thousand Nepali-Bhutanese refugees in eight countries in the global North. In their thirty-two years of marriage, this was the first trip that the couple had taken together. During their harrowing journey from Bhutan to Nepal, when the family moved overnight with their three children and their belongings, the couple traveled from the Indian border to Nepal in two separate trucks. While Phul-Maya was with her children in one truck, Dhana was guarding their belongings inside another. Unable to fathom the situation, I asked how a couple of thirty-two years could possibly have never traveled together anywhere. Dhana laughed and clarified, If we survived as a couple without traveling together during such a time of crisis, why was there any need to make trips together as a couple as long as we lived? If the couple had to jointly attend an event or visit relatives in the refugee camp in Eastern Nepal where they lived for almost twenty years, Dhana rode his bicycle. Phul-Maya walked.

But since their move to upstate New York (NY), Dhana and Phul-Maya regularly walk together forty minutes back and forth to their state-funded English as a Second Language (ESL) classes. The calculus of being a couple in the US is fundamentally different from the practices Dhana and Phul-Maya were accustomed to their entire lives in Bhutan and in the Beldangi refugee camp. From having never made any trips together as a couple to now making a daily mini-trip to their ESL class, the couple spends time with each other whether or not they wish to. A US-funded refugee resettlement project brought them to New York, and ESL classes are mandatory for those refugees whose subsistence depends on New York State’s public assistance. For couples like Dhana and Phul-Maya, who barely know how to read and write in their native language (Nepali), the expectation that they will learn English and then find jobs is merely wishful thinking. Aware of this predicament, Dhana aptly equates his need to go to his ESL classes to "chāmal pakāuna" (cook rice), in other words, to survive. Regular attendance enables the couple to qualify for a monthly allowance for food, rent, and some disposable cash. As the couple lives with their son and daughter-in-law in Syracuse, NY, attending ESL classes becomes a primary means to contribute materially in running the household.

By unpacking and carefully untangling the resettlement experiences of this couple, and many similar to them, this chapter explores how the international humanitarian regime of care and biopolitical care of the state coalesces with the care regime of a Nepali-Bhutanese refugee family. I specifically examine how an elder couple who are part of a transnational Nepali-Bhutanese refugee family engages in strategies and practices of care. My examination of transnational care for Nepali-Bhutanese refugees is inspired by Lisa Stevenson’s (2014) exploration of the notion of care with the Inuit community in the Canadian Arctic. She conceives of care as the way someone comes to matter and the corresponding ethics of attending to the others who matter (Stevenson 2014: 3). In the case of the Nepali-Bhutanese refugees, I focus on how the refugees come to matter at two levels. First, I examine how caring is produced and consumed at the level of the family. Mining from various ethnographic moments from a twelve-month-long field research in Beldangi refugee camp in Nepal and in Syracuse, New York, between August 2014 and August 2015, I illuminate how care at a distance is shown and experienced materially—fundamentally through discourses around money. I demonstrate that money plays a central role in recalibrating notions of personhood and reconfiguring intimate family relations within Nepali-Bhutanese refugees on the move. Second, I illustrate that care within the family is intricately tied to Nepali-Bhutanese experiences of the humanitarian care regime that they were exposed to for two decades in the refugee camp as well as new forms of care that the families experience once relocated to the United States. I specifically employ Miriam Ticktin’s (2011: 13) notion of humanitarian care that is based on a politics of benevolence and compassion for a suffering human in order to understand how Nepali-Bhutanese refugees navigate the everyday humanitarianism that is at their disposal. I examine this navigation, however, only in conjunction with the idea of anonymous care that Stevenson (2014: 5) explores, the idea that care should be administered indifferently, without it mattering for whom. I argue that this conception of anonymous care is productive in parsing how the indifferent nature of routine humanitarian care the Nepali-Bhutanese refugee families experience enables them to maneuver humanitarian care to engineer new forms of care within the family. In short, the main task of this chapter is to demonstrate that strategies and practices of care for Nepali-Bhutanese refugees, who are straddling spaces of a refugee camp in Nepal and a new neighborhood in which they are resettled in upstate New York, sits at the intersection of monetary care, humanitarian care, and anonymous care.

Historical Background

Bhutanese nationals from southern Bhutan who have Nepali ancestry and are native Nepali speakers fled Bhutan in the early 1990s as the Bhutanese government implemented policies to create a homogeneous Bhutan. Specifically, a series of changes in citizenship laws between 1977 and 1985 made it difficult for Nepali-Bhutanese and their families to obtain citizenship in Bhutan (Evans 2013: 122). In addition, the 1989 policy of one nation, one people promoted the majoritarian Drukpa-Buddhist culture, Dzongkha language, and a dress code, and indirectly targeted Nepali-Bhutanese to assimilate (Hutt 2003). The Nepali-Bhutanese were forced to flee Bhutan as they refused to conform to these new policies. Once expelled, the Nepali-Bhutanese sought refuge in India, which shares a border with Bhutan, but were denied temporary residence. As a result, the Nepali-Bhutanese crossed the border into Nepal beginning in 1990. Approximately one hundred thousand expelled Nepali-Bhutanese people temporarily settled in seven camps in Eastern Nepal with the hope that they would soon return to Bhutan. But the refugee issue did not receive the needed attention until 2006 because Nepal was embroiled in a decade-long civil war (1996–2006). Meanwhile, Bhutan continued to mislabel majority Nepali-Bhutanese as illegal migrants and refused to repatriate its Nepali-Bhutanese refugees. As a result, Nepali-Bhutanese remained in refugee camps in Nepal for nearly two decades.

With relative political stability in the country, Nepal assumed a more proactive role and appealed to the UNHCR in 2006 to facilitate permanent resettlement of Nepali-Bhutanese refugees. The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and several countries in Europe agreed to take in refugees in limited numbers. The US government initially offered to resettle sixty thousand refugees, but would later offer an unlimited quota for Nepali-Bhutanese refugee resettlement (Banki 2008: 49). The United States, which had been the primary donor to the UNHCR in maintaining the Nepali-Bhutanese camps for two decades, also emerged as the most popular destination for resettlement. The UNHCR subcontracted the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to oversee the resettlement process in 2007, and, since then, 108 thousand refugees continue to be resettled in eight countries in the global North. More than eighty thousand of the approximately hundred thousand Nepali-Bhutanese refugees globally are resettled in the US (Shrestha 2015). As a result, the US has witnessed 8,255 percent population growth of Nepali-Bhutanese between 2000 and 2010 (SAALT 2012). The American state provides public assistance to these refugee families from the moment they arrive until families become self-sufficient. Depending on a state’s welfare policy, refugees typically get assistance for up to a year after resettlement. It is in this context the dispossessed Nepali-Bhutanese refugee elders, Dhana and Phul-Maya, who lived in Beldangi refugee camp in Nepal for twenty-three years, decided to cooperate with the UNHCR, which would resettle them in the US, their potential new home.

The Camp Family

Dhana and Phul Maya followed their son and daughter-in-law to the US, but they still have a daughter and her family in the refugee camp. In the camp, up until early December 2014, a total of nine family members lived together in a 6 by 3.5-meter bamboo hut, including the families of the couple’s son and daughter (IOM 2008: 9). It was an overcrowded hut, to say the least, without electricity, but the cool mud floor and a slight breeze that circulated through the holes in the woven bamboo walls made the treacherous post-monsoon heat bearable. Privacy was a tricky concept in the hut that housed not only the elder couple, but also their adult children and their families. The couple’s daughter, Puspa, is married to a Nepali citizen and has two daughters. Puspa’s resettlement process only began in November 2015. The couple’s son, Khem, is married to Sapana, and they have a daughter together. When I first met the family in Beldangi refugee camp in August 2014, Dhana’s son and daughter-in-law, Khem and Sapana, had completed the paperwork and other necessary formalities for their resettlement process.² They had quit their jobs as primary school-teachers in order to fully devote their time to completing the necessary bureaucratic requirements of the UNHCR and IOM for their resettlement. It was a general trend among Nepali-Bhutanese families to return from jobs elsewhere in Nepal and temporarily live in the camp to start their resettlement process. Being a UNHCR-managed camp, the residents did not have to fend for basic necessities, and hence quitting a job did not necessarily jeopardize one’s daily subsistence. After finishing their cultural orientation in July 2014, considered the final step before refugees are assigned their departure dates, Sapana and Khem were anxiously waiting for the IOM to give them their final departure date for their relocation to Syracuse, NY. Khem, Sapana, and their daughter, Lily, flew out of Kathmandu the first week of December 2014. A few months later, Dhana and Phul-Maya followed their son and daughter-in-law to the US.

FIGURE 1.1  Dhana and Phul-Maya’s home in Beldangi Refugee Camp, Nepal. Photo by Retika Desai.

Money Care in the Camp

While it made sense to quit their jobs during their process of completing paperwork, interviews, and health assessments, I was puzzled that Sapana and Khem opted not to work between July and December 2014 after completing their bureaucratic preparations for resettlement. Both spent their days playing Ludo in their front porch, a popular board game in Nepal, with their neighbors and relatives, who trickled in and out of their hut throughout the day. Strategically located next to the public water tap, a bare galvanized iron pipe without a faucet that distributed water twice a day to roughly twenty-one surrounding huts, the family hut was always bustling with people who visited the tap for collecting water. Without any access to indoor running water, public taps were the sole source of water for most families. Women would start lining up their jerry cans at 1:00 P.M. every day around the tap and play a quick game of Ludo as they waited to fetch their afternoon water, which gushed out of a parched metal pipe at exactly 2:00 P.M. Sapana’s Ludo hours were interrupted not only by water-fetching duties, but also by her daughter, who, between naps, had to be taken out of her hand-crafted swinging bamboo crib hung in the porch. When not sleeping, the daughter was content crawling around the hut with other children covered in mud and dirt. But Khem could afford to play all day with no interruptions of any kind. To my query of whether it would be a productive use of time if Khem took up a temporary job and made some money while he and his family waited for their departure date, Sapana answered that it is embarrassing to work, especially when people are date waiting, the last stretch of waiting to hear from the IOM for their date to leave the camp. I found Sapana’s response quite curious. On further probing, Sapana explained, If people are seen to be working until the final departure date, others will think that no one sends money to those seen working. Others will think that one has no relatives out there [resettled]. Sapana clarified that it is generally assumed that those families getting ready to leave already have family members resettled in the US or elsewhere who are taking care of