Introducing Tshering Yangchen

When I came to Bhutan I learned about pujas quickly since my vice principal had one the very first week of school. Pujas are religious ceremonies performed for various occasions – new house, new car, a sickness in the family – for the purpose of keeping away demons and bad spirits and bad luck. I knew my school would be having a puja, since they have one every year, but the date was unknown. A lama is consulted to decide when. A puja is also referred to as a rimdro.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I heard that the puja would be on Thursday and Friday. I heard I was on the serving committee. Two other teachers and I would be serving food to all the guests. Guests? What guests? My head is always filled with so many questions when this sort of thing comes up. I was told I would have to be at the school at 6 am and stay until late. How late ranged between 7 pm and 10 pm.

Two days before the scheduled puja I heard from a teacher that it had been postponed until next week because the secondary school was having their rimdro on the same days and the lamas would all be busy there.

Now it’s next week, Tuesday, lunchtime. At morning assembly this morning, the principal announced (in Dozongkha, which I had to get translated) that rimdro preparations would be starting after lunch. Preparations for a Thursday rimdro. What we’ll be doing for one and a half days for preparation is beyond me, but apparently there is a lot of preparation.

The students have no classes until Saturday. The majority of them will attend the rimdro on Thursday, but some have volunteered or have been selected to help out so they will be coming to school tomorrow with the teachers. Friday will be spent cleaning up and getting the classrooms back to normal for classes.

After lunch (which I’m currently on), I have to go back to school with a knife, a bowl (and a roller and slotted spoon, if I had them). What we’re making, I don’t know. I’ll let you know when I get back.

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We made fried cookies (can a cookie be fried or does it have to be baked?), lots of them. When I’ve gone to lakhangs, I’ve often been offered these snacks. It never occurred to me that people make them at home, although I kind of wondered where they did come from. When you do eat them at someone’s house or at a lakhang, they can be pretty basic, not too fancy. But for a rimdro, the cookies are supposed to be elegantly elaborate. I watched at first as my fellow female coworkers made intricate designs and formations. Dechen took the time to show me some tricks. I was pretty amateur my first afternoon of making them, but by the next morning when we made another batch, I was getting quite good. In fact, I taught Dechen how to make a butterfly – the student became the teacher. As everyone admired my unique design, I felt so proud of myself. It seems silly, but in this country, doing anything culturally relevant well is an achievement. I can’t speak the language, I don’t practice Buddhism, but I can make a damn good fried cookie design.




Monks were at the school all day Wednesday. They had first arrived late Tuesday night and they would the first ones to arrive Thursday morning. For a monk, rimdros and pujas are a large part of their working life. Not only are they in charge of preparations – making all the butter statues and other displays and so many other things that I don’t know about – they are also in charge of a day or days full of chanting, warbling, and playing instruments. The monks are in charge of accepting all the donations and preparing the offerings table. They give out the handfuls of raw rice and maize, the blessed water and ara. There is so much. And they get compensated by whoever is having the puja. This is how full-time monks get paid, besides getting a stipend from the government. But for gomchens, also known as lay monks – they do everything full-time monks do except they can get married and have families – conducting pujas is their only form of payment.

Whenever there is any sort of meal or refreshment break or tea break during the puja, the monks always get served first.






I kept waiting for the rush of work to begin. Prior to the rimdro, when I told people I was on the serving committee, they all commented on how much work it was and how busy I would be. It wasn’t like that for me. Because I was new and foreign, I think I was let off the hook quite a bit. For my co-workers, it took more energy to explain what I needed to do than just doing it themselves. Which meant that all day Wednesday, besides making the fried cookies, I pretty much just sat around looking for the smallest of jobs to do, anything to keep me busy. My biggest job was drying the dishes that the students washed. Even though I was literally doing nothing but staring in front of me and periodically interjecting into mostly-Dzongkha/Sharchop conversations, I couldn’t just whip out a stack of papers to grade. Yes, I was at school and, yes, we were preparing for a school rimdro, but academics and schoolwork were the last things on anyone’s mind and I knew that everyone would rather see me do nothing at all than do something that didn’t have to do with the puja. This sort of dynamic happens a lot here. I find it hard to deal with sometimes.

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So instead of a lot of work, I found that the school’s rimdro was a lot of eating and snacking and sipping tea. On Thursday, the day of the actual rimdro, there was either a snack, a meal, or a refreshment every hour and a half. Before 10 am, I’d already had three cups of tea and two breakfasts. At 11, there was a refreshment and at 12, lunch. And since I wasn’t running around serving or making sure the serving was done right, all I was doing was eating. It really was this odd feeling to just be in the midst of a machine – the puja machine. Everyone around me had been to hundreds of them and had also been the host of many throughout their lives. There I was, just watching them talk in Dzongkha, exchange directions or suggestions or orders. At one point Rinchen, who was on the serving committee as well, was crying. Apparently, the vice principal had reprimanded us, the serving committee, and I missed the whole thing. I was right there but missed the whole thing. Usually, my staff members are pretty cognizant of informing me of what’s going on, what’s being said, but the rimdro happenings didn’t allow room for that. The feeling of being an obvious outsider was a bit hard to take, especially since it lasted for hours on end, but I had to just accept it, to deal.

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Aside from eating, we also had to pray and throw rice to cleanse our sins. Around every hour or so, someone would tell me that it was time to go into the room where the monks and Khenpo were conducting the actual ceremony. I’d grab my rachu, head upstairs to the new staff room where everything was taking place, take my shoes off, and enter cautiously with everyone else. At times like these I just go with the flow. I prostrate if everyone else is prostrating. I put my hands together in prayer if everyone else is. I sit in Indian-style. I accept handfuls of dried rice and maize and throw small bits of it at a time when everyone else does. I cup my right hand and have blessed water or ara poured into in so that I can take a small sip and garnish the top of my head with the reset. Instead of meditating through, as I imagine everyone else is during intervals of not doing anything, my mind wanders to how strange all of this is. How beautiful and different. How foreign.

The students’ actual involvement in the school rimdro was slight in my opinion. There were around 30 students workers who had been a part of the whole thing, several of them even sleeping at the school to ensure their early start for work in the morning. But for most of the student body, for whom I figured the rimdro was primarily for, the day was about hanging out with friends for a few hours and waiting for their meal of dessi (sweet rice) and suja (butter tea). Probably less than half of them were able to go through the ceremony room to make an offering or receive a blessing.

I found myself happier than normal to see the students. After all, they could only speak English with me and I was craving some conversation after being stuck in Dzongkha and Sharchop land for too many hours. But they didn’t stay that long and mostly they were wrapped up in the events of the rimdro and being free to have fun with their friends.





As evening neared on Thursday, the ceremony part of the rimdro was wrapping up. Dinner had yet to be served, but the monks would be finishing up their chanting and instrument playing. The students had already come and gone. It was time again – the last time – for all the teachers to go into the room. This time was longer than usual. The monks paraded the boy and girl figures, which were meant to represent the students, around the room and out the door as the rest of us threw rice at it. I’m not exactly sure what is done with them but I got the idea that they will be thrown in the river as an offering. Throughout the rimdro, offerings of old clothing and money were given to the figures and placed beside them. I don’t know what happens with these items.


At some point the instrument playing and the chanting ended and the Khenpo started talking. This is where I really spaced out, my mind wandering to a place I cannot recall, just somewhere else. Around 30 minutes into his speech, the Khenpo addressed me specifically. I was jarred back to the present, back to the room. One of the teachers translated as the Khenpo directed his attention to me. He said he could tell that I was different, that he could see in my eyes that I was really absorbing Bhutan and its culture. He said as long as there was goodness inside of me, goodness would materialize. And vice-versa. Then he asked if I wanted a Bhutanese name. I recalled that the Japanese volunteer who had left when I arrived had a Bhutanese name. It didn’t occur to me that this was how he must have gotten it. Of course, I accepted. I got up off the floor, walked to where the Khenpo was sitting. As I’ve expressed before, I never really know what to do, but seeing as how I was before the Khenpo and he had a stick in his hand, I bowed my head. Usually with a blessing, the stick rests on your head for less than a second. This time, it laid there for some moments. I guess he had to think. When the Khenpo lifted the weight of the stick off my head, I looked at him and he said, “Tshering Yangchen.”

I am Tshering Yangchen.

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As a thank you to the Khenpo and the monks, the principal and some of the teachers, including me, danced and sang. I didn’t sing of course, but the steps to some traditional Bhutanese dances – being a simple series of back and front or side-to-side footing – are fairly easy to pick up quickly. I held the hands of my co-workers, listened to the lift and fall of their voices, and, as one body, in front of the monks and Khenpo, we moved.

The blessing of the new school building. In conjunction with the annual school rimdro, the monks consecrated the new administration building which also holds two classrooms. This is standard in Bhutan. All new houses, apartments, cars must blessed before use.


The best part. While the student body didn’t have that much to do with the actual rimdro, every single student gets their share of tsho (blessed food), which is really a bunch of junk food – biscuits, fried things, dried ramen, puffed rice, and other edible items. The Saturday after the rimdro was spent distributing the tsho. A few students came prepared with plastic bags, but most of them stuffed the blessed food in their ghos or held in the folds of their tego.