This weekend was Shaping BO - the annual Bhutan Observer staff retreat, held at Pelri Cottages in Paro. The idea of spending my weekend sitting in meetings wasn’t thrilling. Having to leave at 5:45am on a Saturday definitely didn’t help either. To top it all off the place where we were staying is supposed to be haunted.
Sushil (our designer) was eager to fill me in on his encounter with the Pelri ghosts in 2009. He made sure I was well aware that the owner of Pelri Cottages had recently passed away. I would’ve laughed this off as an attempt to scare the foreign girl, except that Sushil didn’t seem like he was joking and his story was backed up by our cartoonist and the marketing manager who had stayed in the same cabin the previous year.
But, as it turns out, this weekend was one of the best I’ve had in any part of the world!
Songs
After the first day of meetings ended, all of the staff from the Observer (including the bureau staff) sat around a big bonfire. The Bhutanese whiskey was cracked open and the fun began! To break the ice everyone had to sing a song. The punishment for refusing to sing? Washing the dishes for all 50+ of us!
At first everyone was either too embarrassed or too sober to sing. But as the whiskey got flowing everyone was volunteering for another round of songs. For some reason I decided to sing Bob Marley’s Buffalo Soldier and even Madame Phuntsho belted out a tune in Dzongkha (the national language). By the end of the night, we had the entire Observer staff singing Dzongkha songs and dancing in a huge circle around the bonfire. I had no idea what the songs were about or how to perform the steps, but I found myself having the time of my life! Never would I have thought that one day I’d be drinking Bhutanese whiskey and dancing around a bonfire with a bunch of reporters in the Land of the Thunder Dragon.
Sex
Needrup (the Observer’s English editor) utilized the bonding session to give us a detailed insight into the subtle art of ‘night hunting’. Night hunting is a traditional form of Bhutanese courtship that is still practiced in some parts of rural Bhutan, including where Needrup grew up. It involves meeting a girl at night in her bedroom for a “midnight rendezvous”. Needrup had us all in stitches as he told us about his many experiences of night hunting, including the time he trekked for two hours through the forest to the next village to visit a girl that he fancied, only to arrive and see his best friend hanging from the wall as he climbed to the girl’s window. Or, about his many friends who’d inadvertently ended up with wives after accidentally sleeping in at the girls' houses. When this happened and the girls’ parents caught them, the local lama would be called and the couples would be forced to marry. He told us how, without torches or mobile phones, it was difficult to be completely sure that you had actually climbed into the right bedroom. This led to many awkward encounters that involved less than impressed fathers being woken up by adolescent boys in the middle of the night. If I ever hear any of my male friends from home argue that flowers, chocolates, dinner and a movie is a lot of effort, I’ll tell them, before they complain again, to trek through the forest for two hours, climb up a wall and wake up a sleeping father in the middle of the night!
Spirits
When we woke up the next morning (feeling a little worse for wear) we found out that one of the members of our staff had been taken to hospital. Apparently he’d been haunted by spirits and fallen unconscious. What was even spookier was that he’d been staying in the same cabin that Sushil had stayed in the year before! In the end he was fine, but I must admit I was slightly wary for the rest of the trip! (So much so that at one point I had a severe stomach ache and was convinced that it was the work of the Pelri spirits)
The serious stuff
Of course the retreat also involved meetings and serious discussions about the future of the newspaper. Topics included:
- Whether the Observer was still in line with its original vision and mission statement
- The need for a solution to the saga of the printing press
- Human resources issues
- Circulation problems
- Problems in the bureau offices
- The need to decide on a theme for the annual Faces of Bhutan magazine
One topic that I found particularly interesting was the debate on whether to include international news in the Observer. This issue arose from reader feedback about the Observer’s failure to cover Aung San Suu Kyi’s release. Needrup strongly felt that including a page dedicated to international content would compromise the vision and mission of the newspaper as being “truly Bhutanese”. He argued that if there was not enough content directly related to Bhutan, reporters would have to “download” content from the internet. I can understand where Needrup is coming from but, from a marketing perspective, I argued that if consumers want to buy one newspaper a week, they are more likely to choose the newspaper which gives the broadest coverage.
This same conflict arose in regards to Madame Phuntsho’s proposal for an environmental page. Needrup argued that there isn’t enough content originating from Bhutan to fill an entire page, and that not enough is going on in Bhutan to warrant a page specifically dedicated to the environment. I argued that this is exactly why we SHOULD have an environment page. I am constantly noticing how Bhutan’s picturesque environment is being destroyed by waste, especially in Thimphu. The environment falls directly under the pillars of Gross National Happiness yet there are few effective initiatives being undertaken in Bhutan. Environmental issues in Bhutan, such as climate change and pollution can’t be isolated from what is happening in the rest of the world, especially when India and China are right on its doorstep. In the end, it was decided that over the next couple of months we would explore the feasibility of begin for a reporter with a background in science.
Sitting in the meetings and listening to the passion and commitment of the staff to maintaining the vision of the newspaper made me optimistic and confident about the paper’s future. I walked away from the last meeting with the following 'to do' list:
- To organize and write another BO Focus (supplement focusing on specific social issues in Bhutan)
- To get sponsorship for:
- My Page (A page for children with content by children)
- The READ Bhutan project
- The Dzongkha poetry competition
- To write an article for the annual issue of Faces of Bhutan
From the serious stuff to the not so serious stuff,I enjoyed every moment of the Shaping BO 2010 and can’t wait to see what 2011 brings for the Observer!
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