Part II Day 100: May 30, 2010 (Bhutanese photo exchange, does this one make me look fat? and trading in your low-carbon lifestyle for an American one)

Position: Volunteer

Number of Days Officially Unemployed: 135

Hours Volunteered: 2

EDD Check: $250 per week

We bring the beach day photos to the Bhutanese family's house, and they each take a turn riffling through them. The photos prompt them to bust out a small photo album of their own. We go page by page, and the family explains who each person is in the various group photos, taken mostly in Nepal. "This is my grandma's sister and her daughter," the youngest daughter says. I tell her that would make the woman her mother's aunt, and the daughter her mother's cousin.

In many of the photos, the youngest daughter has really short hair and the brother has his hair combed down over his dot-marked forehead, not spiked up like he wears it now. In some pictures they stand in a lush, green forest of broad-leafed plants and sparse, tall trees, or they stand by their refugee camp houses. The mother points to the wall of the house in the photo, and says with embarrassment, "Our house, um, bamboo."

"That's cool," I say, trying to make her feel less embarrassed, but also projecting a long-time simpler-life fantasy of my own. "I would rather live there."

As we flip through more group photos, the mother says, "This sister––New York," and then points to another woman, "Her––Chicago." Etel brings up the possibility of the mother visiting the sister in New York, where her parents will soon arrive from Nepal. "No, Teacher," she says. "Daughter in school. Son in school. I no English. No, Teacher." She smiles only because she's uncomfortable speaking English, but inside her heart must be crushed like ours. "Someday, maybe," Etel says.

The older daughter comes out from the back bedroom and sits down to look through the album with us. She looks beautiful in the photos, as she does in real life, but she points to a picture of her and a friend and says, "I was fat then." I ask her if it's because she ate a lot, but she says she doesn't know why she was fat. Maybe just growing pains, since they ate pretty much the same diet there, minus the Cokes and Flamin' Hot Crunchy Cheetos.

I still can't help but wonder if they weren't better off in Nepal, even if they lived in camps. They had their family, which the mother may never see again now that they're separated in America. No one looked to be starving in the pictures––the oldest daughter was even heavier than she is now. Not only was the landscape beautiful, but they had a planted ornamental garden between the bamboo houses that the youngest daughter said is where they would sit and talk. Like most immigrants, they want a better life for their children, whatever that may look like.

Maybe it's because I've been reading books on sustainability, such as Auden Schendler's Getting Green Done and Thomas L. Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded, but in the Energy Climate-Era, as Friedman calls it, moving people from low-carbon producing lifestyles to an American lifestyle, where our carbon footprint per person is 20 tons of CO2-equivalent per year, or 5 times the rest of the world's average, just seems short-sighted. Overall, we want the trend to go the other way, if we are to survive as a species. (Bhutan, according to this article, is struggling to stay "carbon neutral"––but they're also the assholes who booted the Nepalese from their country.) What is it they say? The road to hell is paved with good intentions?

I don't want to minimize the suffering the family endured in being moved from Bhutan to Nepal and living in a refugee camp, but the suffering they have endured and will endure here––not only from living in abject poverty and being separated from the rest of their family, but from the loss of respect the parents will endure from their children, who, during our intense game of Uno today, slapped cards out of their parents hands and treated them like children––may not be an even trade.