For new readers, please visit our Bhutanese archive for background because I would have to write a book to bring you up to speed. We have been taking thousands of Bhutanese (Nepalese) refugees ever since the Bush Administration began admitting them in 2007 (or was it 2008), it doesn’t matter, the bottom line is now we are headed toward 80,000 admitted so far and many are struggling.
According to this article as many as 55 have hanged themselves when they learned the “American dream” was a nightmare for them.
From the Los Angeles Times (hat tip: Joanne):
Som Subedi is stuck in traffic. He’s running late to check on one of his flock: a 37-year-old woman who’s among scores of newly arrived Bhutanese immigrants he watches over like a worried parent.
Ran Gurung is on Subedi’s watch list. A refugee advocate, he fears Gurung is not adjusting well since arriving in June from a camp in Nepal, where her husband mysteriously vanished. She came to the U.S. alone, with only a few relatives already here for support.
Feds didn’t want to listen at first. Why? I suspect they didn’t want anything to interfere with the warm and fuzzy feeling they get from their do-gooder work.
That’s how Subedi discovered a disturbing trend: Bhutanese immigrants in the U.S. are killing themselves at an alarming rate. Many deaths take place during the 15-day Dashain holiday that starts in late September. The festival celebrates family and community.
He calls it the Suicide Season.
In six years, up to 55 Bhutanese immigrants have hanged themselves, using ropes or traditional scarves, and Subedi suspects the rate might be even higher. He has hounded federal agencies such as the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement to investigate the trend. He sent emails, made telephone calls, even traveled to Washington to address officials.
“I was bothering them,” he said. “I was a pest. It was what I had to do.”
The American dream is dangerous!
Why were people killing themselves when they were finally free of the hopelessness of the camps, able to start a new life?
Then it struck Subedi: For many Bhutanese, the American experience was just plain lonely.
He wrote a column for the Oregonian newspaper, questioning the American dream. “I am a refugee from Bhutan,” he began, describing how he once encouraged friends in the camps in Nepal to hurry to the U.S., a place he called “close to heaven.”
He wrote: “Now I see those newly arrived struggling; they question me about my ‘heaven.’ Some say they would return, if possible, to their dark refugee camps rather than face their desperate situations in Oregon. I have come to feel that ‘the American dream’ is dangerous, because people come here with great expectations. I have stopped calling the camps in Nepal.”
There is so much more, read it all.
I hope all of this gives pause to the social engineers at the UN (which promoted this resettlement because they wanted to close the camps in Nepal, while never of course wanting to close the camps housing the Palestinians!), the State Department and their paid lackeys (the church contractors). The arrogance of Americans! It never seems to occur to any of them that people are better off in their own cultures with their own kind of people.
We did learn just recently that the Bhutanese program is to be closed and the spaces made available to Syrians (who will be another unhappy bunch arriving in your cities soon). Come to think of it maybe the Syrians won’t be so unhappy because the mostly Muslims mission here will be to be part of Al-Hijra thus giving more meaning and purpose to their lives in America. The Bhutanese are mostly Hindus.
