Free So Close to Heaven by Barbara Crossette

productive. We want them to be professionals in every field they take up. If you are a sweeper, we want you to be a professional sweeper. If he is a mechanic, we want him to be the best mechanic he can be. This is why we have opened over two hundred schools in Bhutan, and one hundred fifty-eight health facilities.”
    The policy of aiming high in human development explains how Ugyen Dorji, the village lad from faraway Lhuntsi district, found himself in Bregenz, Austria, apprenticed to a pastry chef a decade ago. He tells the story as we sit over coffee in his Thimphu café, a sideline to the most popular bakery in town. He calls the bakeshop the Jichu Drake in honor of a sacred Bhutanese mountain. In the kitchen, burly men in clunky shoes, flour-splattered ghos, and sheepish looks were furiously stirring batter and dough, chocolate in one vat, white éclair paste in another. The ambience may have been small-town Bhutanese, with babies playing around the pastry counter, but the cream horns and vol-au-vents Ugyen Dorji produces are European in both inspiration and quality. They are served in all the best homes, in government offices, and at all kinds of parties. Business is good. Last time I saw the chef, he tooted as he passed by in a new imported car as I was walking back from a tour of the general hospital. Next time I came to town, he was off in India (or was it Bangkok or Singapore?) buying more kitchen equipment.
    Ugyen Dorji began his education in the mountains of eastern Bhutan by trekking for several days to a distant school at the beginning of each term, a sack of rice on his back. The rice was all his widowed mother could afford to give him for the food he would need as a boarder. Shehad pleaded with local officials not to take her son away to school; they were insistent that he had ability and would benefit from education. From time to time, Ugyen Dorji said, she would take precious time to walk to his school to visit him and replenish his small stock of food. After completing a basic education, he drifted to Thimphu, where he eventually found a job in a government hotel, the Motithang. His knack with food got him noticed. The apprenticeship followed. He spent five years in Bregenz, and he returned a master, this mountain boy. But his mother, still living in a Lhuntsi village, has yet to make the trip to Thimphu to see her successful son at work. And he can’t spare the time very often for days of walking to his hometown.
    There are other Ugyen Dorjis now, young men with scrubbed knees and new shoes or what are obviously their first pair of Western trousers, waiting at the Paro airport for a flight into the modern world to become engineers, doctors, business leaders, or maybe sanitation experts. Europeans welcome them as good investments in scholarship aid. They don’t seem to get homesick. They work hard. And when they come home, they make a difference, just as King Jigme Singye Wangchuck expects they always will. He takes a paternalistic pride in every Bhutanese achievement because they were born of royal policy, not public pressure—at least in the past.
    “What most people don’t understand is that this development in Bhutan has not been asked for by the people; it was not thrust upon us,” he said of the monarchy. “We have done it because we believe that this will go a long way in educating our people in becoming more politically conscious, and at the same time to be able to actively participate in the decision-making process in all forms of development programs, both in their districts as well as nationally. If democracy in essence means that the government has to be supported by the people, decision-making has to be shared by the people, then I feel that in essence we have a far more democratic system than practically all the developing countries and some of the developed countries.
    “We want to develop as rapidly as possible, but nevertheless what is important to us is that the pace of development