Danielle Preiss

Kamal Dahal’s memory of his family’s entry into the US is undiluted by time. “We came here September 17, 2008, 5 pm,” he remembers. “Continental Airlines, by the way.”

“That’s an important thing,” the 20-year-old says of the beginning of the family’s new life after nearly two decades in a refugee camp in Eastern Nepal.

Not only was the day important, it was terrifying. The then 16-year-old Kamal, his parents, older sister and younger brother had travelled from Kathmandu to New Jersey with a group of Bhutanese refugees and a Nepali guide. In New Jersey, the guide left, the group separated, and Kamal found himself trying to understand why his boarding pass to Cleveland was marked with the letters ‘ROC.’

Kamal learned that ROC stood for Rochester, New York, but assumed the family was simply travelling there en route to Cleveland. He didn’t know the International Organization for Migration had changed the family’s placement at the last minute. When the plane landed in Rochester, the Dahals didn’t move. “We were afraid to get out because we didn’t want to miss the flight to Cleveland. I thought the plane would just start up again and take us there, like a bus,” he laughs.

When the flight attendant finally forced them off, Kamal’s limited English was swallowed up by fear. “I couldn’t talk because I was so, so scared,” he explains. All the family could do was show the tag Kamal’s father, Indra, wore around his neck, which contained the words ‘I am a refugee, I cannot speak English.’

Now living in an apartment in Rochester, the Dahals still struggle to move beyond that tag. They are one family, but their challenges are likely shared by many of the Bhutanese refugee families scattered across the country. The US government originally offered to resettle 60,000 individuals. But the 60,000th Bhutanese refugee entered the country in September and more still continue to follow.

According to Jennifer Pincus, who worked with the Dahals and other Bhutanese families through the Catholic Family Center, in these cases, the younger generation becomes a vital connection between parents and the rest of society—“the only link to the outside world”—something the Dahal family is familiar with. “From the day they arrived in Rochester, [Kamal] was the one everyone in the family was dependent on,” says friend of the family, Lee Adnifos. “He’s always assumed the role of the adult in the family.”

Kamal’s responsibilities rose in 2010 when Indra, now 47, began to struggle with depression and had to stop working. “He was sick since 2008, but we didn’t really know,” Kamal says. “I thought he was just stressed because we were starting a new life.” Mental health issues can begin to surface six months or one year in, once families have become settled, Pincus says. “Everyone seems to be doing really really well and they have minor bumps in the road…and then all of a sudden mum or dad will get taken to the emergency room because they’ve had a psychotic breakdown.”

Kamal explains that his father struggled with the feeling that he couldn’t care for the family. Indra had begun working in Bhutan at just eight years old after his father died. In Nepal, he had continued to work despite the difficulty of doing so as a refugee. Kamal remembers his father carrying bamboo poles for several miles for a meagre pay.

Bhim Phuyel, a former neighbour of the Dahals, recalls how hard it was for Indra to adjust to life in America. “Here when you go outside, you can’t do anything,” Phuyel says, referring to the struggle with language. “He felt like he was in prison.”

Around the same time, the family’s federal benefits needed to be renewed, but Kamal didn’t understand the paperwork. As mail piled up from the Department of Human Services, his fears grew. “There were so many letters. It was our first year and it was hard to understand what was going on.” One of the first Bhutanese families in Rochester, the Dahals lacked the social network that now helps in these situations. They lost their food stamp benefits and Kamal left school after his sophomore year to work in the laundry room at a downtown hotel.

Then, in 2011, Kamal’s older sister, Gita, got married and moved to Salt Lake City, Utah. While happy for her, there was sadness as well. “We felt really bad,” Kamal says. “We only have one daughter in our family and she was also the oldest.”

While in Nepal, the eldest son is typically responsible for the family, Pincus says the pressure is greater in the US. “They’re expected to carry on tradition, but there’s this tension between that and trying to fit into American culture,” she says. “It must have been a hard time for Kamal…he became the only one who was kind of taking charge of the family. Before, it was probably more of a team effort.”

Kamal now takes his father to a Hindi-speaking doctor for consultations, and makes sure he takes his medication. Indra is back to work in housekeeping at the Hyatt hotel and with the money his wife, Narayani, 38, makes from the same job at the Marriott hotel, the family earns enough to take care of their basic needs without public assistance. “It’s not the best life, even though we have enough in terms of material things,” says Kamal. But, he adds, his parents made the decision to sacrifice their lives for their children.

“The fact that my brother was raised in the US means he’s different than if he had been raised in Nepal,” he said. Rabin, 13, doesn’t like Nepali food. The private middle school he attends on a charitable basis feeds the students and he now refuses to eat daal bhat, asking for sandwiches instead. But he will have the education his parents never did.

Kamal now studies at the prestigious Rochester Institute of Technology, having gotten his high school equivalency and attended community college. He still struggles to make friends though, explaining that his responsibilities haven’t left him enough time to study American culture. A recent assignment related to baseball resulted in embarrassment because he didn’t understand the sport. Still, when a career fair at RIT drew representatives from Google and Intel, Kamal realised how far he’d come. Unthinkable six years ago, now, “there’s some chance that I might get a job there.”

“Whenever I ask my parents if they had a choice of where to go, they always say, ‘I’ll go back to the place where I came from,’” says Kamal. “Not the camp, but Bhutan. If I ask my brother or even myself, however, we’d say America, definitely. Rochester.”

Preiss is currently pursuing a master’s degree at Syracuse.

Published on: 1 December 2012 | The Kathmandu Post