Bhutan - WKTV Journal

A U.S. Census ad designed to reach the Arabic community. (U.S. Census Bureau)

By Joanne Bailey-Boorsma
joanne@wktv.org

Kentwood resident Sagar Dangal understands people’s hesitation about filling out the U.S. Census. When he saw his first census in 2010, his reaction was much the same.

“I remember when I first saw it, I was like what is the census?” said Kentwood resident Sagar Dangal. “I’m not going to fill this out.”

Flash forward 10 years to 2020, he is not only filling out his own census questionnaire but working within the Bhutanese community to build a bridge of understanding about the U.S .Census and its importance.

This is not an easy task. Concerned over the Nepali minority in Bhutan, the Bhutanese government conducted a census targeting the Nepali community within the country. Due to persecution, many of the Bhutanese Nepali fled the country with a large population, 85 percent of the refugees, eventually settling in the United States.

“The issue of illegal immigrants and the concern of deportation is not something of a concert with the Bhutanese community,” Dangal said, adding most are U.S. citizens having come to the United States in 2007/2008. The older generation still remembers what happened in Bhutan, Dangal said, and that is where the education of what the census is becomes important.

“Once you explain what it is, that it is a count of the people, and not about ethnicity, but rather to assure that your community is getting the funding it needs, then people are more open to it,” Dangal said.

A U.S. Census ad designed for the Hispanic community. (U.S. Census Bureau)

Daniela Rojas, fund development and communication manager of the West Michigan Hispanic Center of Commerce said she has found the same with the Hispanic community.

“Response has been pretty positive,” Rojas said. “People may not understand what it is or how it impacts their daily lives, but they are not seeing it as a negative.”

Rojas admitted that the true test will come if people respond by filling out the census in March and April.

A hurdle for the Hispanic community has been concern that census would be use to find illegal citizens even though the question of U.S. citizenship has been removed from the census.

“Of course, we are living in a time of fear and distrust, but I believe we have done well in helping people understand that this is how federal money will impact the next 10 years,” Rojas said.

The West Michigan Hispanic Chamber of Commerce is one of many agencies that has received grant funding from the Heart of West Michigan United Way to help with the U.S. Census. The Chamber has been canvassing communities, giving out materials in Spanish and English and “I Count” buttons at various events, and does work on social media. The organization handed out more than 3,000 flyers at August’s Hispanic Festival.

“We are making sure that people know that the information gathered is helpful not hurtful,” Rojas said, adding that the biggest hurdle has been the lack of smartphones, WiFi and other electronic devices where people could go on their own to learn more about the census. The other challenge has been reaching people who have “thrown up their hands on the census and the government because they really don’t see where it matters.”

A U.S. Census ad focused on the Vietnamese community. (U.S. Census Bureau)

The census does matter, according to Kerry Ebersole, executive director at 202 Census, State of Michigan.

“Every person is profoundly impacted by the the U.S. Census as it is the gold standard in how the federal government distributes its funding,” Ebersole said.

For the State of Michigan, it is about $30 billion from the federal government that is distributed to the state. This covers funding for a number of items such as health care, school lunches, Meals on Wheel, transportation, along with determining representation in the U.S. House and the Michigan House and Senate.

Flyers like this one at Wyoming’s Marge’s Donut Den are being put up to help inform people of the upcoming census. (WKTV/Joanne Bailey-Boorsma)

Helping to spread the word about what the census, the U.S. Census Bureau recently announced an extensive advertising campaign that features ads focused on several minority groups such as the Hispanic population. The 2020census.gov site also includes content and guides in 59 languages, such as Nepali, Dutch, Greek, Spanish, and Swahili, with residents able to respond to the nine census questions online and by phone in 13 languages. The entire 2020census.gov site includes information in both English and Spanish.

To help make sure Michigan citizens are counted, the State of Michigan has established its own website, michigan.gov/census2020 and on social media can be found by searching for Mi Census.

By Joanne Bailey-Boorsma
joanne@wktv.org

Sagar Dangal is the host of the Bhutanese Talk podcast. (WKTV)

For the past couple of years, Kentwood resident Sagar Dangal has been wanting to put together a show focused on his community, the Bhutanese.

“The show is about the Bhutanese issue from my perspective, someone who grew up in the refugee camp,” Dangal said, adding that is the reason he titled his podcast “Bhutanese Talk,” which can be found at the wktvjournal.org under the “Podcast” tab.

First, a history lesson

Bhutanese are from the Asian country Bhutan, bordered by India and China and just west of Nepal. Bhutan is about half the size of South Carolina, totaling around 14,800 square miles. It has a population of 758,288, which is about 12 percent of the U.S. population, which is estimated at around 9.8 million.

Since the 1600s people from Nepal settled in the southern region of Bhutan however, larger settlements of people with Nepalese origins happened in the early 20th century as the government saw it as way to collect more taxes. The Nepalese — or Lhotshampas as they are called in Bhutan — where never given the same status as the majority, the Drukpa people.

Bhutan is an Asian country bordered by China and India. (Free Domain)

In the 1980s, worried about the growing ethnic Nepali minority, the government adopted the Bhutan’s Citizenship Act of 1985, also called the “One Nation, One People” policy. The government had officially adopted the culture of the northern Bhutan, banning the teaching of the Nepali language in schools and requiring residents to dress in the traditional clothing of the Drukpa. The act created tension between the Nepalese people of the south and the Bhutanese of the north.

Tensions grew to demonstrations which escalated in the 1990s with more than 100,000 people — many who had families that had lived and farmed in southern Bhutan for generations — leaving the country to live in refugee camps in eastern Nepal.

Dangal’s family was among those who left in the early 1990s.

“This podcast is not only about, ‘hey my parents were forced out of their home country and we became refugees and the government of Bhutan did not treat us well,'” Dangal said during his first podcast. “It is not all about that. Those are all facts. It will always stay with me and it will always stay with my parents, and thousands and thousands of Bhutanese folks.”

About 96,000 Bhutanese are ow living in the United States. There are about 15,000 still living in the refugee camps in Nepal. (Wikipedia)

A Community Connected

Dangal said technically he was born in the refugee camp and lived most of his life there, coming to the United States in 2009 when he was 16. From about 2008 to 2015, approximately 111,673 Bhutanese refugees were resettled to eight different countries with about 86 percent of the Bhutanese population coming to the United States. Dangal estimated the total Bhutanese U.S. population to be about 96,000 of which somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 live in the Wyoming/Kentwood/Grand Rapids area.

“We are not really refugees anymore,” said Dangal, who became a U.S. citizen in 2017. “We have settled.”

Dangal lived in Lansing, attending school there and Michigan State University. After graduating from MSU in 2017, he moved to the Grand Rapids area, where his family had located.

“Even through we live all over the United States, a group might be in Pennsylvania and another in California, because Bhutan was such a small country, we all know each other and we are all connected,” Dangal said.

Like for most refugee groups. the transition to living in the United States has not been easy for everyone, something Dangal has seen firsthand with his own family. He noted that the Bhutanese community has one of the highest suicide rates when compared with other immigrant communities in the United States, a topic he explores in his second podcast.

He plans to explore the traditions and beliefs of his community and the generation gap that has evolved as the next generation, many of whom have not lived in Bhutan, embrace the American culture. To help build the bridge of open dialog, Dangal said he plans to speak in his native language, with some English, so as to reach his target audience.

“With this show, I wanted to talk about the Bhutanese refugees, the issues, both the positive and negative,” he said, “talk about the progress and the downside of some of the issues in and within the Bhutanese community not just those in Nepal, but in the United States and all over the world.

“The show is about the issues I see in my community and how we can approach them, how we can talk about it, how we can tackle it and how we can actually make things better.”