The Sharmas, including Laxyman, left, and his sonm Dilli, fled to Nepal in the 1990s and resettled in Tucson in 2009. (Daniel Woolfolk/NYTI)
Traveling to Katmandu, the Nepalese capital, they boarded a plane for the first leg of a 24-hour journey across the globe.
The Sharmas, ethnic Nepalese expelled from Bhutan, were part of a group of 30 refugees on the flight, many of whom had never been on a plane. “Some of them vomited,” Sharma, 22, said.
Their final destination was Tucson, where they were welcomed by scorching heat. His first taste of desert weather, said Sharma, who was accustomed to much milder temperatures, was “unbearable.”
After their long trek, the refugees arrived in this Southwestern city to carve out a new life. They join a growing enclave of ethnic Nepalese who fled Bhutan and lived as refugees in neighboring Nepal for nearly two decades before coming to the United States.
Pima County is home to more than 730 Bhutanese refugees, most of whom started arriving in 2008, according to the Arizona Refugee Resettlement Program, a state program that works with refugees from various countries.
Across the country, more than 5,200 Bhutanese arrived in the United States between 2007 and 2008, the last year for which official data was available, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Web site.
Sharma and the other six members of his family spent their first week in Tucson getting adjusted to their new environment, learning, for example, how electricity worked in their apartment, since their huts in the refugee camps had no power.
For much of the summer, the Sharma family spent most of their time inside their air-conditioned apartment.
“It’s very uncomfortable,” Sharma said. “How can we stay our whole life in this very hot place?”
Still, Tucson is far more preferable to the Sharmas and their fellow Bhutanese refugees than the life they left behind.
In the early 1990s, tens of thousands of ethnic Nepalese fled southern Bhutan after the government said they were in the country illegally and started a campaign to force them out. The government claimed the Bhutanese had no documentation to prove their citizenship.
Sonam Tobgay, counselor at the Bhutanese Embassy in New York, said in a telephone interview that the Nepalese were asked to leave only after a census revealed their illegal status.
But Amnesty International calls the actions of the Bhutanese government discriminatory and says it was these policies that provoked demonstrations by the Nepalese, which were met by violence and set off an exodus from the country.
Seven refugee camps were eventually built in Nepal, housing an estimated 100,000 refugees, who have remained in limbo as Nepal has refused to offer them citizenship, citing the country’s own internal strife.
Devi Adhikari, 44, who now lives in Tucson, fled to Nepal from Bhutan in 1993 and for 15 years lived in a hut made of bamboo and thatch. Besides lacking electricity, he had no running water. The refugees existed on rations of rice, lentils, vegetables, sugar and salt. There was also no privacy, Adhikari said.
“I speak from my hut and the people in the other hut used to hear me,” said Adhikari, who became a leader of one of the camps and a principal of one of the schools. “There was not enough space.”
Adhikari’s chance to leave the camp finally came in 2007, when the United States announced it would resettle 60,000 refugees. Adhikari, his wife and his three children, as well as his parents, arrived in Tucson in June 2008. “I was waiting to go back to Bhutan,” Adhikari said, “but it was all in vain.”
New Home, New Challenges
Arizona was one of the chosen destinations when the resettlement program began because it seemed to offer plenty of job opportunities, said Charles Shipman, a coordinator for the Arizona Refugee Resettlement Program.
But the economic meltdown has made life much harder for the Bhutanese refugees here. About half of all refugees in Arizona, including Bhutanese, are unemployed, Shipman said.
The stream of Bhutanese into the state is nonetheless expected to continue, Shipman said, as they are moved out of the refugee camps under the federal government’s program.
A lack of jobs is making it difficult for some refugees to pay their rent, according to the Bhutanese Mutual Assistance Association of Tucson, a civic group formed a year ago. And the many challenges the refugees face, including a language barrier, have led to depression among some, said Adhikari, the association’s president.
A struggle to make ends meet, Shipman said, is “very demoralizing for people.”
“Like anyone who doesn’t have a job,” he said, “it’s emotionally draining.”
Sharma has yet to find a job six months after arriving in Tucson. He interviewed for jobs as a housekeeper at a local hospital and a short-order cook at a food court in a mall, but never heard back.
The Sharma family survives on the modest income of two family members. Laxyman Sharma, 66, Sharma’s father, receives Social Security benefits, while Tara Sharma, 20, works as a house cleaner.
“It’s difficult,” Dilli Sharma said. “I need a job.”
Two local agencies, the Tucson branches of the International Rescue Committee and Catholic Social Services, help refugees with their résumés and job searches, and a local college, Pima Community College, offers job training.
“We come from a very undeveloped country, so the skills don’t match,” said Purna Budathoti, a Bhutanese refugee and a caseworker for Catholic Social Services.
The Bhutanese themselves are providing support through the civic association, helping when problems arise, holding fundraisers to pay for weddings and organizing cultural celebrations to preserve Bhutanese culture.
“The Bhutanese who are coming here seem to have a sense if everyone works together, it will benefit them,” said Ken Briggs, director of the International Rescue Committee’s Tucson office.
Adhikari, referring to the Bhutanese Mutual Assistance Association, said, “We tell Bhutanese friends — if you are free, help them.”
Sharma and his family are still trying to adapt to their home. A new member of the family, Christina, was born to Sharma’s brother, Krishna, 29, and Krishna’s wife, Jasoda, 26, on Jan. 6.
The family has been living in two different apartments, one a studio, the other a three-bedroom unit, in an apartment complex on the northwest side of Tucson. In the larger home the white walls are bare except for the Christmas lights still hanging throughout the apartment.
Although his parents stick to their traditional vegetarian diet, Dilli Sharma now likes pizza with meat toppings. He also regularly watches news broadcasts.
One day, Sharma said, he might like to visit his abandoned homeland. But he would never live in Bhutan again.
“In there we are in a cage,” he said. “When we came here we flew away from the cage.”
A version of this article appeared in print on page 1 of the Tucson 2010 edition of The New York Times Student Journalism Institute.