As we reported in our 2017 booklet, Path to Empowerment: Refugee Artisans of Worcester (Rodgers and Ummuna, 21-22) our summer 2017 interview with Som started with this energetic elderly artisan watching a Nepalese-language movie on his family’s large tv screen in their front room in their home in Shrewsbury, MA. Our translator was Som’s daughter-in-law, Pabritra, who was a social worker at a refugee advocacy organization in Worcester. She had learned fluent English when they family lived for years in a refugee camp in Nepal, after being forced to flee their homes in Bhutan due to government threats to this minority population. This household was very education-conscious: Pabritra’s son was studying engineering in university and her daughters were in pre-medical school programs at college. They all greatly valued having the presence of 94 year old Som in their home with them: He was a revered artisan in the community, working in bamboo in old Nepalese village styles. He had learned to make a wide variety of baskets, trays, milk jugs, and rain hats as a child and youth in Bhutan by carefully observing men making these practical and beautiful objects and then simply trying to imitate them, until he had the skill down pat after many tries.
Som values very precise work with carefully honed and measured bamboo strips. His weave is always tight and even. He told us that when he was younger his milk jugs were so tightly woven that the liquid would never seep out; now his weave is indeed a bit looser but still lovely. His rain hats (which extend down over one’s shoulders) are both practical and artistically compelling.
Som spent part of the summer days working in his garden out back of the house. He grew vegetables but also medicinal herbs. A number of the Bhutanese artisans, we found, were expert in cultivating and compounding natural cures for various ailments. In these Nepali-speaking Bhutanese families in central Massachusetts, the healing arts are quite broad in scope. The families make thorough use of American biomedicine, with its hospitals and health care professionals, but they also deeply appreciate the healing strengths of rituals and the natural world.
