February 5, 2018September 5, 2023 by ebolton1

Barbie

Choki Beda’s daughter calls out to me every time she sees me. “Barbie! Hello, Barbie!”

The call is a reminder of how I must look to most people here, with my unnatural white-blonde hair and pale skin. Each time I see Nidup, I am chagrined to be reminded of the gap between my exterior appearance and my Barbie-mocking interior.

This site offers reflections from a Fulbright year in Bhutan, 2017-2018. The phrase “The Great Happiness” refers to a line from a Buddhist prayer:

May all being have happiness & the causes of happiness;
May they be free from suffering & the causes of suffering;
May they not be separated from the great happiness which is devoid of suffering;
May they dwell in the great equanimity, free from passion, aggression, and prejudice.

How to distinguish “the great happiness” from smaller notions of happiness is one of questions this project may eventually engage. In the meantime, the blog will sketch the smaller daily adventures of adapting to a very different land.

Betsy Bolton is Professor of English Literature at Swarthmore College, where she has just completed three years of service as Faculty Coordinator of Environmental Studies.

A proponent of citizen art and community-based digital storytelling, she served as a Fulbright Scholar exploring place-based writing in Morocco in 2013-2014.

An environmental humanist by commitment and a Romanticist by profession, Betsy is interested in learning from diverse sources, shifting cultural norms, increasing environmental justice, and finding ways to help us all adapt to a changing climate by creating conditions in which we all may thrive.