Another Bhutanese refugee kills himself; ripping
people from their culture sometimes is inhumane, by Ann
Corcoran 7/19/18
Note that he worked in a meat processing plant! Even in Vermont, refugees work in slaughterhouses! Why didn’t that make him happy?
This
story comes from Vermont. I haven’t written about Bhutanese refugees in awhile.
To date, we moved over 96,000 of the Nepali people (mostly Hindu, some
Buddhists) who had been expelled from Bhutan to American towns and cities.
Go here for
a post which gives a little of the background about the George W. Bush era plan to help the UN
clean out its camps on the border of Nepal. It was supposed to be a joint
effort with many other countries, but of course we took the vast majority of
them.
We
said we would take 60,000 beginning in 2007, but as is always the case, we go
way beyond what we told the public we would do. Here is where they were
distributed in the US (from Wrapsnet): The
US took 96,106.
We have also reported on many previous occasions about the exceedingly
high suicide rate in the US Bhutanese ‘community.’
It
is interesting to me that many do-gooders who push refugee resettlement to
America never grasp that some people cannot make the cultural shift and that
pushing resettlement can actually have deadly consequences, as it did for this
man.
If
you go back to my early posts (see archive) on
the Bhutanese resettlement, you will see that the camp dwellers initially
fought like hell to not be “scattered to the four winds.”
From Seven Days: Agencies Alarmed by Bhutanese Refugee
Suicides. On the morning of April 10, Indra Mainali was running errands in
preparation for his daughter’s birthday party when he received a frantic phone
call from his wife. Indra’s father, Hari, had called her and said, “If you want
to see me for the last time, come to Ethan Allen Homestead.”
Indra
rushed home and contacted Rita Neopaney, a Bhutanese case manager at the
Association of Africans Living in Vermont, who alerted the police.
When
Indra arrived at the Burlington landmark, where Hari had established a garden
plot the previous summer, an officer told him his father was dead. Asked how it
happened, the officer replied, according to Indra, “He used a rope. We will
know more after the postmortem.”
Bhutanese
refugees resettled in the U.S. are twice as likely to die by suicide as members
of the general population, according to a report published by the U.S. Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention in 2012. That report covered 16 deaths
reported in 10 states between 2009 and 2012, none of which were in Vermont. But
the local landscape has since changed.
We had no strategic interest in the
squabble between Bhutan and Nepal, it was simply a case of the UN telling us to
jump and we did!
Hari,
52, was the second local Bhutanese refugee to die by suicide this year,
according to members of that community, which numbers about 2,500.
Health
providers and social support agencies that work with Bhutanese refugees are
concerned about “what seems to be a growing trend,” said Friedman. “This is
something all of us have a responsibility to be working on.”
The
U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement prompted the CDC to investigate suicides
among ethnic-Nepali Bhutanese refugees after finding that, from 2009 to 2012,
their estimated age-adjusted suicide rate was 24.4 per 100,000 people, nearly
twice the rate in the general U.S. population. The CDC’s study pinpointed
various possible motivations for the suicidal acts, including integration difficulties,
family separation, lack of resettlement services and social support, and
disappointment with career prospects. All of the suicides studied occurred
within a year of arrival in the U.S., and only one of the deceased had ever
talked with others about committing suicide.
By all accounts, Hari seemed to have adjusted to his new environment. He
worked at a meat processing company, had a garden plot at the Ethan
Allen Homestead in summer 2017 and spent his leisure time fishing. Still, he
knew little English and lamented that he needed an interpreter for all of his
appointments.
Even
a government-funded garden plot didn’t help!
However, visit the story which takes a whack at policies in Washington that
might have led to his inability to integrate. More government money
please!
Meanwhile, at the national level, the federal government is cutting
funding for public and mental health services, and anti-immigrant rhetoric is
increasingly prevalent. Under these conditions, providers worry about public
insensitivity to the stresses that refugees face.
See
my category ‘health issues’ where I have posted 349 previous posts
on the topic of health, including mental health, of incoming refugees.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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