Sitting in her backyard, soaking up the early summer sun, 75-year-old Sukmaya Rai remembers her childhood grazing goats amidst the terraces of paddy and maize in her home village in Bhutan.
Her family was forced out of Bhutan with 100,000 others, trucked across India and deposited in Nepal’s Jhapa district. She spent the next 20 years in UNHCR refugee camps, and was finally among those resettled in 2008 in eight countries, including the United States.
“I have experienced a lot of pain and hardship in my lifetime,” sighs Sukmaya, adding that although life is more comfortable here in a Pennsylvania town than the bamboo huts in the refugee camp, her pain persists.
The grandmother’s family is scattered across five continents, and the COVID-19 pandemic has made movement difficult even for relatives in the US. Her 10 sons and daughters and 27 grandchildren live separately in Bhutan, India, Nepal and the US.
“Perhaps I will not meet them in this lifetime”, she says in Nepali, “I will pass away while this never-ending suffering continues.”
Sukumaya Rai lived in Simkhet village of Chirang District in Bhutan with her husband Jas Bahadur Rai. The farming couple raised their family, and were not well-off but were happy. One day, her husband was approached by a Dungpa district administrator who ordered the family to leave the country. They had to comply.
When the Rais arrived in Nepal with their youngest children, they were taken with the other refugees to a UNHCR camp by the banks of the Kankai River in Jhapa. But due to the unsanitary conditions, her husband and brother both died of an infectious disease 15 days apart.
“Many more died, every day bodies were being taken away from the camp towards the river to be creamted,” she recalls.
Suk Bahadur Gurung and Phulmaya Gurung migrated to Pennsylvania seven years ago after being relocated from the Beldangi Camp for refugees from Bhutan. Suk Bahadur was born in Ramitar of Chirang Gopini in Bhutan, but became an orphan at the age of two and grew up a farmer.
In 1990, he was summoned to a government office where a Dungpa seized his citizenship document, and erased all proof that his family had lived there for three generations.
“If I had the courage I have now, perhaps I would have questioned him, but there was nothing we could do but leave the motherland,” says Suk Bahadur, who had to leave behind their homestead, farm, livestock and a plantation of 500 supari trees.
While life in the refugee camps was difficult, adjusting to life in America is a different kind of struggle – against solitude and a deep longing for a faraway home he was forced to abandon in Bhutan long ago. Suk Bahadur has by now learnt English, can pay with his credit card at the local store, and is slowly settling into life in America. A neighbour passes, and he raises his hand to say: “Hi, friend!”
With COVID-19 deaths crossing the 100,000 mark, many resettled people from Bhutan are sheltering in place. Counties in Pennsylvania are still in a red-shutdown phase, and the elderly former refugees know they have to be careful because 70% of the deceased are above the age of 75.
Jamuna Pradhan, 63, spends her days at home, separated from her relatives because of county lockdowns in the same state. Jamuna was forced out of Bhutan with her four sons and daughters in 1992, and lived in the refugee camp in Sanischare in Nepal for 16 years before finally being resettled in America in 2009.
Her son Bal Bahadur and daughter Harkamaya live in Pennsylvania, but her daughter Radhika lives in New York which is just recovering from the coronavirus pandemic. Her son Deunarayan lives in North Carolina, and her daughter Goma got married and is settled in Nepal.
Having been brought up in a family of farmers, what Jamuna misses the most is the farm she left behind in Bhutan and cannot forget the sight and smell of the orange orchards of her childhood. She tears up as she describes the home she was made to give up.
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