04/10/2023
BECAUSE A HALF-MOON DOESN’T STAY HALF
First published in the book ‘The People’s Pandemic’ published by the Ministry of Health (title rewritten)
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Young men and women in handsome orange uniforms were everywhere monitoring the porous border building temporary living quarters for Bhutanese relocated from India; preparing rooms and serving meals in quarantine facilities; loading and unloading essential foods and supplies during lockdown; patrolling the streets in Thimphu and Paro for breaches in safety protocols; screening travellers at points of entry; assisting surveillance teams during mass testing; and manning vaccination posts. These were the de-suups – the Guardians of Peace – quietly effective members of a volunteer corps founded by the King in 2011 for disaster relief operations and other exigencies.
According to the mandate of De-suung, as the programme is called, the corp’s main training objective is to ‘encourage all citizens to be active in the greater role of nation building’. De suung emphasises values such as community service, personal integrity, and teamwork.
Before the pandemic, de-suups were known for being on the front lines of wildfires, landslides, and rescues. In 2015, when a major earthquake struck Nepal, the King sent de-suups to help run a district hospital. Although Covid-19 may be the most far-reaching and complicated crisis that Bhutan has faced in recent times, the intensive De-suung training prepared these men and women well.
Before the pandemic, standard De-suung training lasted five weeks, with each day beginning as early as 4 am. As the enormity of the challenge became clear, in the spring of 2020, the course was condensed to three weeks, with more people accepted into each class or numbered ‘batch’. Bhutan’s armed forces, police, and disaster management personnel are few. Because frontlines on the ground were desperately needed, the De-suung corps was dramatically scaled up. From the programme’s inception in 2011 to the first Covid-19 case in Bhutan in March 2020, only 4,457 Bhutanese had completed the training. By April 2022, the figure was 26,257.
Who were these men and women in orange? They ranged across Bhutanese society: members of the royal family, parliamentarians, business people, civil servants, teachers, homemakers, former monks and nuns, and unemployed youth. The Bhutanese newspaper pointed out during the first national lockdown in August 2020, ‘These heroes are ordinary fathers, mothers, wives, husbands, daughters, sons and siblings, all with families and familial responsibilities at home.’
That month, some 8,000 de suups were deployed in lockdown duty across 20 districts – 2,000 in Thimphu alone and 1,700 along the southern border. They slept on schoolroom floors and hotels, ate in common mess hall, and typically didn’t see their families for months at a time. They endured extreme winter cold in the north, intense summer and monsoon downpours in the south, smugglers and knife wielding attackers along the India border, feral dogs, and all manner of wildlife (one de-suup barely escaped with his life when he was attacked by a wild elephant in Samtse).
In April 2021, sensing an opportunity to augment the vocational competencies of the younger members of the corps, many of whom had never gone past grade 10 and were out of work, the King launched the De-suung Skilling Programme to reach any member who has interested skills that they could convert into a post-pandemic livelihood.
Among the programme’s graduates was Tandin Wangmo, ‘the Gelephu woman’ whose erroneously positive viral test fortuitously triggered the first national lockdown. After that lockdown ended, she joined the De-suung and moved on to the skilling programme, specialising in culinary arts. Wangmo’s chef-trainer praised her momos (dumlings), and Wangmo now hopes to open a restaurant in her home village. What will she call it? ‘The Half Moon Restaurant,’ she said, smiling optimistically during zoom conversation.
‘Because a half-moon doesn’t stay half. It becomes full.’
