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Starting Life Anew: Bhutan refugees leave Nepalese camps, resettle in modern housing in the U.S.
AP Photo
Molly Ferra, a case worker with Catholic Charities, shows Chitra and Raju Gautam how to work a shower and bath in their new apartment.
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Published: December 1, 2008
CASTLE SHANNON, Pa.
Chitra Prassad Gautam and his family watch in awe as water comes out of the shower head in the bathroom of their new apartment.
"I have a question," Gautam says, holding up a bottle of shampoo. "Do I put this in my hair before going in the shower or after?"
Gautam, 19, his parents and his two siblings are among the first of about 5,300 ethnic Nepalese refugees from the tiny south Asian country of Bhutan who this year started leaving refugee camps to resettle in the United States. The U.S. has agreed to take in 60,000 of them.
Bhutan is a predominantly Buddhist constitutional monarchy bordered by China and India. In the early 1990s, the monarchy instituted sweeping legislation that effectively stripped the ethnic Nepalese, a Hindu minority also known as the Lhotsampas, of their citizenship, their right to own property and their ability to get government jobs.
Since then, an estimated 100,000 ethnic Nepalis have fled to refugee camps.
Like most others in Bhutan, the Gautams were farmers. Gautam and his sister, Uma, 17, were born in Bhutan. Their younger brother, Raju, 15, is part of the generation born in refugee camps in Nepal. They were educated in schools run by the United Nations, an education that gives these children an advantage over their parents, many of whom are not even literate in their native Nepalese.
In 1992, the Gautams moved into a one-room, dirt-floor hut in a camp about 25 miles from the Nepalese city of Damak. They often had to wait in line for hours to fill two cans with water. They shared a latrine with another family and bathed in a river.
But now they are in their new apartment in the Pittsburgh suburb of Castle Shannon. They have suddenly had to adapt to running water, indoor toilets, carpeting, closets, a refrigerator, electric sweepers and clock radios.
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