Ngawang Phuntsho

On quiet mornings, over coffee, certain thoughts return with unusual clarity. One of them is relationships. Among Bhutanese who move to Australia for study, work, and a better future, I have often noticed two very different stories unfolding inside relationships. Both begin with hope. Both begin with sacrifice. But they do not always end in the same place. Migration changes many things. We speak often about jobs, permanent residency, children’s education, and financial security. What we discuss less is what migration does inside the home, between two people, in the quiet space behind closed doors. I have seen couples who arrive here and grow stronger. Australia (any other foreign country for that matter) quickly teaches people that survival is shared work. Rent is high. Bills do not wait. Both partners often work long hours, sometimes in jobs far removed from what they once imagined for themselves. A husband who never entered the kitchen back home learns to cook after a late shift....

When I first came to Perth, I did not notice much grey in my hair. Maybe a strand here or there, but nothing to worry about. A year later, things changed. My hair started turning grey in a way I could not ignore. Some friends told me it was stress. Moving to a new country, starting over, learning to build a life from the ground up. Stress can show up in strange ways, they said. I nodded, but I also had my own theory. Back home, as children we were told that salt makes your hair turn white faster. If salt had that kind of power, then why not salty water? I convinced myself that the Perth water was the reason my hair was changing. It made sense to me. I am yet to discover any scientific experiment, if any. But for now, that's a topic for another blog post.  And then I noticed something else. The speed at which our hair fall. All of a sudden grey hair do not bother us anymore. The amount of hair I lost every week was shocking. Friends and acquaintances shared the same story. Almost ...

Some of my friends still update their blogs, though less often than they once did. I stepped away from mine for a long stretch, (lost a year or two in between) despite how much I valued it. That absence feels like a loss. And it is.  The shift is easy to explain. This is the age of social media and vlogging, where video dominates attention. Readers, even those who could easily turn to text, often prefer images and voices on a screen. Newspapers have seen the same decline. For those who once relied on print, television and digital media now deliver news instantly. Even major outlets fight for shrinking audiences, with survival tied to depth and serious analysis. And that's my excuse of my failure to blog more consistently?  Of course, for bloggers, the space has narrowed. I feel that our audience is even smaller. The influence weaker. Yet I am not ready to abandon mine. I want to keep it alive, even if posting comes only once in a blue moon. But when that moon rises, it makes ...

A sense of place is a feeling that makes one feel at home and thereby at peace whenever he or she is in a particular area or think of one. It is the first impression or a deep sense of recognition that is deeply rooted in our memories. It is a feeling of happiness, and a sense of safety, an expression of endearment toward a particula r place (Cross 2001).   Before I travelled to Perth for my studies, I used to work in Thimphu, though I was born and raised in a small village called Wamling in central Bhutan. Although Thimphu offers modern facilities and infrastructure, it is only back in the village that I feel entirely at home. It's here I get a sense of peace and experience a sense of belongingness; it's where I can genuinely be myself.   In Wamling, our day breaks with a crowing of a rooster and mooing of cows in the distance. Somewhere a horse neighs, and another reciprocates from nearby. A dog howls and chickens chuckle in the coup. A stream gurgles down the hill turning p...

In our everyday conversation, we refer to something or someone as ‘resilient’ if that entity rises above hardships, struggles, and setbacks and succeeds. Resilience, in this sense, denotes the ability of a person or objects to handle difficult situations. This short account describes what a resilient community would look like and discusses some of its features.   Walker and Salt  (2012)   define resilience as the ‘ability’ of an individual or a system to withstand ‘shocks and keep functioning in much the same kind of way.’ In other words, it is ‘the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, and feedbacks – to have the same identity.’ Therefore, ‘resilience thinking’ gives us a ‘useful framework’ that helps us understand more why systems behave in a particular way  (Walker and Salt 2012) . Rob Hopkins   (2009)   identifies three critical parameters to consider when looking for a commun...

System is a collection of interrelated elements that create one complete and unified whole. All components within it constantly interact with each other to achieve a specific purpose.  For example, a car is a highly sophisticated form of a system. Hundreds of different parts work together to make it move in the desired direction, and even if a small part is missing, the car will fail to run.  From the system, I learnt that system thinking is a perspective of things around us, which makes us see how everything is connected to other things. In the above example, it is not just the motor that creates the motion in the car but combined work of all the parts in the vehicle. For example, even if everything works, without an accelerator, the car will not move in the desired speed that we want it to run.    Therefore, system thinking forces us to think about the relationships between things and how they influence the overall system. It makes us see the bigger picture. For ex...