By Joanne Bailey-Boorsma
joanne@wktv.org

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.

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.”

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.”