Refugee Life: Between Silence and Survival

By Shiva Lal Dahal

The essay, first published in Nepali in Dahal’s anthology of contemporary essays Albida Beldangi, has been translated into English, with revisions, by Ramesh Gautam.

The Weight of Refugeehood

A refugee, in the most literal sense, is a person who has been expelled from one country and has taken refuge in another. This is what outsiders see, what governments define, and what organizations record. But that definition is only the surface. To be a refugee is to inhabit a different world—one that is hard to explain to those who have not lived it.

The refugee I know is an image of the unknown, a symbol of dependence, a miniature humanity of Lilliput. It is hunger and thirst; it is a little love but far more hatred, some sympathy but much contempt. Refugeehood cannot be captured in words alone—it must be endured. I have endured it, and I continue to endure it.

The condition of refugeehood has existed since ancient times and has never ceased. Perhaps it will persist as long as borders exist, as long as humankind exists.

Exile is woven into our oldest stories. We find it in the Mahabharata, and we find it in the Bible. Our Tibetan neighbors have carried it for six decades—exile and persecution—across India and the world, fighting countless struggles. And today, many nations still hold up the sick faces and broken images of their refugees to plead for humanitarian aid.

For us, the Bhutanese expelled in the early 1990s, exile was not a myth but a lived reality. Families left behind land, livestock, and memories, crossing rivers and forests into Nepal. My own family entered a refugee camp on March 21, 1993. Refugeehood meant learning to live without a homeland, without a flag, without a place to claim as one’s own. It was not only a physical displacement but also an emotional wound, a silence that haunted even after words ran out. It meant being known not for who we were but for what we had lost.

Relief and the Early Days of Refugee Life

If the meaning of refugeehood is loss, silence, and the wound of statelessness, its reality first took shape for us in the relief camps of Nepal, where survival began with the distribution of rations and the construction of fragile huts. Each person received a fortnightly ration: six kilograms of rice, 350 grams each of oil and sugar, and 50 grams of salt. Every week, we were given 300 grams of vegetables—whatever was available at the time, cabbage, pumpkin, radish, or banana—and 300 grams of potatoes. Each family was allotted a hut to live in, a toilet, and access to basic medical treatment. On such meager provisions, refugees survived.

Along with food and shelter came a few essentials: cooking pots and jars, kerosene, two or four coarse, itchy blankets, and every year or two, a change of clothes—sometimes no more than a piece of a cast-off garment. Children were offered schooling up to the tenth grade; adults, a handful of informal classes. These were the beginnings of refugee life, although even these scant provisions grew increasingly scarce over time.

To those looking in from outside, such aid might not seem so. For the donors who gathered and delivered such resources, it was not insignificant. But for those of us who had to make a life with it, the inadequacy was stark. Only we knew how much—or how little—such rations could sustain an everyday human life.

At first, Nepali society saw Bhutanese refugees as victims of injustice, people driven from their homes and broken by suffering. Those who had witnessed the horrific scenes of Maibagar could not restrain their emotions and offered generous help. The sympathy and assistance shown by the people of Jhapa—businessmen, intellectuals, politicians, and ordinary citizens—during those early days cannot be praised enough. Jhapa had long been familiar with refugee suffering, having once sheltered Burmese exiles.

But when the camps were formally established and relief began to be distributed, attitudes shifted. Some locals began to sneer, calling us “Bhotanges who came here out of hunger.” Relief turned into a source of envy. “The organization has given you everything you need,” they said. “You have lived and eaten. What more pain do you have?”

What they could not see was the suffering hidden behind this so-called “living and eating.” Is the purpose of life merely to fill the stomach? Or is it also to dream, to aspire, to transform? We had lost our land, but our minds, feelings, and desires refused to surrender, refused to become refugees.

On June 14, 1991, UNHCR began channeling aid through the Nepal Red Cross Society. Under its umbrella, housing, food, water, toilets, education, and healthcare were arranged. After the desperation of Maibagar, this felt like a great relief—an immense act of humanitarian kindness. Yet the flow of people fleeing Bhutan did not stop. The largest number arrived in 1992.

In those early days, few dared to leave the camp. Anyone caught outside without permission risked losing their ration card. Even the educated and skilled remained inside, working as teachers, health staff, or volunteers in political groups. Yet behind every role lay private grief. Some carried scars of torture. Some had family still imprisoned. Others had relatives killed or infants who had died of disease and hunger in their mothers’ arms. Above all, everyone bore the anguish of leaving behind homes and villages where generations had lived. Despair, anxiety, and grief—they were etched on every face.

A single hut measuring 18 by 12 feet housed families of one to eight. If the family were larger, a hut twice that length would be given. One side of the space served as a kitchen, while the same area also functioned as a bedroom, dining room, and children’s play area. Life unfolded within those fragile walls: sons brought daughters-in-law, children were born and raised, and families marked milestones. The toilet stood only three or four feet away, and the smell of excrement often filled the room. This was the home of the refugees—a bamboo-and-plastic hut where we thought we had finally escaped the suffering of Maibagar, where we could at last live.

But human beings are creatures of endless desire and aspiration. Avoiding hunger and covering our bodies was not enough—we longed for space to breathe, to act, to live beyond the suffocating boundaries of the camp.

Adaptation, however, came swiftly. Because we shared language, culture, and civilization with Nepalis, settling into the new environment was easier. Gradually, wounds began to heal. Contact, relationships, and interdependence between refugees and locals grew.

For them, the camp became a market: a place to sell vegetables, fruits, yogurt, and milk. For us, it became a source of labor. At first, authorities tried to prevent people from leaving for work, but confinement could not last. Slowly, refugees began slipping out in search of jobs, hoping to earn a few rupees.

Educated refugees found teaching positions in private schools. Sometimes, due to local hostility, they were arrested in Jhapa or Morang and dragged back to the camps—only to be released again. Yet as English-medium schools expanded, many Bhutanese teachers were absorbed. Our fluency in English was treated almost as a miracle.

Resentment, however, grew. Nepali workers accused us of taking their jobs, of working for less, and of lowering wages. Over time, refugee labor spread widely: to the Indian territories of Jammu and Kashmir, Assam, Meghalaya, Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Darjeeling, and Karnataka, and across Nepal—from Ilam in the east to Pokhara, Baglung, and Syangja in the west. Refugees toiled everywhere: planting rice, harvesting cardamom, digging roads, building houses, sawing wood, planting brooms, extracting coal, and guarding gates. Some returned with earnings; some were robbed or beaten; some never came back at all, and only the silence of their absence reached their families.

Yet no one can live forever in sorrow. Human beings reach for moments of light. In the camps, too, life did not end—it continued to flow. Children were born; the old passed away.

At first, celebrations were rare. Later, festivals returned. Dashain and Tihar were celebrated once more. Alongside them came other occasions—marriages, upanayan rituals, and pujas. Refugees working far away came home for these events. Families gathered, and for a while, sorrow was set aside. During Tihar, people sang Deusi-Bhailo, danced, and played games, lightening their heavy hearts.

The camps, too, became centers of education and awareness. Officially, schooling was limited to the tenth grade, but Nepal’s open environment allowed many to pursue further studies. In the early years, DANFEY and UNHCR scholarships supported students; later, Caritas Nepal expanded access to higher secondary education. Oxfam led adult literacy classes, while the Nepali Language Council, Bhutan, nurtured literature and language.

Despite hardship, the camps blossomed into spaces of linguistic, literary, and cultural awakening—proof that even amidst huts and hunger, the human spirit searches for light.

Camp Life and Social Struggles

Relief allowed us to survive, but survival was not the same as living. Inside the camps, deeper struggles revealed themselves—disease, division, and the slow corrosion of dignity within the fragile huts that became at once shelter and prison.

The bamboo-and-plastic walls leaked in the monsoon, cracked under the heat, and shivered in storms. Water had to be fetched from shared taps; queues stretched long; quarrels broke out. In the rainy season, mud clung to our feet and soaked the floors; in the dry season, dust coated everything, invading our food, our beds, and even our lungs.

Disease thrived in such conditions. Diarrhea, dysentery, and cholera claimed children’s lives. Malaria, typhoid, and tuberculosis spread quickly through the crowded huts. The stench of open drains and nearby toilets lingered constantly. Survival meant learning to live with sickness as a daily companion.

Exile did not strip away the social habits we carried from Bhutan. Caste-consciousness returned, splitting families and dictating marriages. Old prejudices did not die in flight; they only found new disguises. Religious divisions, too, grew sharper. Some missionaries offered food and aid in exchange for conversion, while others resisted fiercely, and the friction tore at a community already reeling from pain.

Corruption seeped into the structures that governed us. Camp officials sometimes withheld rations, awarded scholarships to kin, or used their positions for personal gain. For those already humiliated by dependence, this was a new bitterness to swallow.

And beyond corruption, there was another wound that overshadowed every good—our constant belittlement. It may be that a thousand good things exist, yet if one wrong occurs, it is that single wound that draws all the attention. For us, that wrong was constant: as refugees, we were belittled, mocked, treated with hatred and contempt, insulted, and humiliated—especially by certain groups of people in Nepal.

Foremost among those who demeaned us were, ironically, the very employees of the organizations meant to serve us. Not all, but many. After them came some locals, carrying the feudal arrogance and narrow-mindedness of poverty. In their eyes, refugees were base and inferior beings, little better than animals. To them, we were uncivilized, ignorant, and incapable. No matter how educated, we were expected to move only at their signal, to obey their rebukes, and to submit to their commands.

Even UNHCR’s policy of paying Nepali employees ten to twenty times more than refugee employees doing the same work became a convenient weapon for belittlement. At the health post, the community medical assistant would scold us. In the ambulance, the assistant would bark at us. At the rice distribution, the staff would curse us. At the Refugee Coordination Office, we would be interrogated in coarse and degrading words. To be a refugee was to accept everything in silence, to be forced into mute submission.

Many refugee workers, however, still gave their labor freely, serving in social work without salary or benefits. Yet some bore the stamp of Bhutan’s old autocracy: when a Nepali employee nodded his head, they wagged their tails in agreement, exalting him with blind obedience—as though the tyranny had never left.

Still, alongside these shadows, light persisted. Education became a lifeline. Schools built within the camps not only taught children but also offered employment to educated youth. Cultural programs, plays, poetry recitals, and storytelling preserved dignity. Literature written in the camps—poems of sorrow, stories of displacement—circulated hand to hand, reminding us that we were not only victims but also witnesses and creators.

Within the camp, social problems grew. Alcohol and gambling tempted the idle. Young men, frustrated by confinement, sometimes drifted into theft or violence. Rumors of prostitution spread—many exaggerated, some malicious—but they deepened the stain on our already fragile dignity. Each year of uncertainty made the camps not only sites of survival but also of moral testing.

The deepest wound was silence: the absence of solutions, the absence of answers. Negotiations between Nepal and Bhutan stalled, year after year. Refugee leaders quarreled, split, and reformed—each claiming to speak for us, none able to deliver the one thing that mattered: a return to our homeland.

As time stretched on, despair deepened. For children born in exile, Bhutan became not a homeland but a story. Their flag was not Bhutan’s, and neither was it Nepal’s. They belonged nowhere.

Beyond the Fence: Work, Identity and Alienation

If camp life was marked by overcrowding and conflict, stepping beyond its boundaries brought another kind of trial: the struggle for work, identity, and acceptance in a society that often looked upon refugees with suspicion or contempt. To be a refugee outside the camp was to live in constant negotiation—with employers, with students, with society, and with oneself. Inside the camp, there was no need for explanation; everyone bore the same wound. But once outside, identity itself became a burden.

Outside the camp, attitudes toward us were never uniform. Some Nepalis showed sympathy, treating us as kin. Others mocked us as “refugees who eat and do nothing.” Many saw us as competitors for jobs, land, and wages. Between gratitude and resentment, our place was always precarious.

Some concealed the truth, passing themselves off as locals to secure work. Others, like me, could not. I never hid who I was. I told the school administrators the truth, for concealment was impossible. Sometimes urgent matters called me back to the camp, and I had to ask for leave. Still, I confined my work to the districts close to Jhapa. I did not venture farther.

In the classroom, I spoke only of the curriculum, never of my childhood, my family, or my past. Some students guessed the truth from my English, which carried a different cadence, but they did not speak it aloud. Perhaps they understood my silence. Perhaps they knew it would wound me.

Many others could not take this path. To avoid hostility from unemployed locals, to escape ridicule, and to prevent rejection, they lied. Employers, eager for cheap labor, preferred refugees at lower wages. Some students mocked teachers openly once they learned of their background. To carry the label of refugee was to live under constant scrutiny.

I vividly remember the years I spent working at a boarding school in Birtamod. I had been there for nearly seven years when I began the process of resettling in America. One day, the principal, echoing the tone of a harsh superior, told me, “If you work for the next session, then work. If not, we will find an alternative.”

This was not how they treated Nepali teachers. Dozens came and went freely. Some stayed a week or a month before finding better prospects. No conditions were imposed upon them. But on me the rules were heavy, simply because I was a refugee, because I had spoken the truth.

It was not just me. Many fellow refugees in schools and other jobs endured contempt, humiliation, and double standards. They were treated as second-class employees. And yet we bore it silently, because silence was the only defense left to us.

In such moments, one felt utterly alien—foreign even in an ancestral land. To walk outside the camp was to feel the tiger in the forest and the tiger in the heart, both restless. It was as if we were forced to deny our very existence. Nothing in the world is more exhausting than hiding the truth, and yet truth, when revealed, carried rejection.

So many grew tired. Some chose to retreat into the camp, where, despite hardship, at least there was belonging. There, no one asked for introductions. Everyone shared the same silence. Everyone understood the same pain. To step into the camp after many days outside was to return to another world, a world of one’s own.

Even the fragile hut, with its leaking roof and thin walls, sometimes felt dear. What makes a home is not bamboo or plastic, not palace or clay, but the love, affection, and harmony of those within. In that truth, we found solace.

Such was the paradox: outside the camp, humiliation and alienation; inside, hardship and suffering. But between the two, we chose survival. And in that survival, we carried on—teachers, laborers, mothers, fathers, children—each with an untold story, each with a wounded yet unbroken heart.

Broken Flags: Politics, Leadership and Betrayal

Neither the confinement of the camp nor the humiliation outside its fences could be separated from the larger forces that governed our fate. Behind every ration card, behind every rejection, there was always politics—politics that had exiled us and politics that continued to betray us in exile. Our exile itself was born of politics: the politics of a state that stripped us of land, citizenship, and dignity.

When we arrived in Nepal, we carried not only our grief but also our politics. Within days of the first huts rising, political organizations were born. Leaders gave fiery speeches, printed leaflets, organized rallies, and promised repatriation. For a time, hope was alive; it pulsed in our meetings, in our marches, and in our whispered dreams.

But the years dragged on, and that hope turned to silence. Negotiations between Nepal and Bhutan circled endlessly without end. Bhutan hardened its stance, dismissing us as “illegal immigrants.” Nepal, though sympathetic, lacked both strength and will. India—the one country whose role was decisive—remained a mute spectator. Refugees waited, waited, waited. The door to return never opened.

Inside the camps, politics decayed into factions. Leaders splintered into rival groups. Some courted Nepali political parties for influence; others tightened control of camp committees and ration lists. Corruption crept in like rot: relief materials diverted, scholarships unfairly distributed, resources siphoned away. Those who had once looked to their leaders for guidance now saw betrayal staring back.

We were told to march, to fast, to protest. We were told to keep faith. But what did it yield? Meetings in luxury hotels, leaders traveling abroad for conferences—while the common refugee remained behind in the leaking hut, waiting in endless circles of despair.

The literature of the camps recorded this bitterness. Poems spoke of leaders living like kings while their people begged for rice. Songs carried the grief of betrayal. Young men, once hoarse from shouting slogans of liberation, grew disillusioned. They watched their elders quarrel over posts and positions, while their own lives wasted away inside bamboo and plastic walls.

The deepest wound was to see politics itself transform—from a promise into another prison. We were refugees not only because of Bhutan’s injustice, but also because of the failures of those who claimed to represent us.

As the years stretched unmercifully, a new possibility appeared: third-country resettlement. At first, it was rejected as treachery, denounced as a plot to scatter us across the earth and erase our identity. But as negotiations collapsed and the dream of return grew faint, families began to accept it. To some, it was a doorway out of despair; to others, it was the final betrayal of the homeland.

The camps divided once again—not only by caste or religion, but by the question of whether to go or to stay. In the end, tens of thousands departed for the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe. One by one, the camps emptied. Yet with every departure, something intangible was lost: a fragment of the collective dream, a shard of the shared struggle.

Those of us who remained behind looked up at the fluttering flag—not Bhutan’s, not Nepal’s, and not yet the resettlement country’s—and felt once more the ache of belonging nowhere.

It was politics that made us refugees. It was politics that kept us refugees. And it was politics that scattered us across the world, leaving behind nothing but ashes of broken promises.

Disasters and Human Resilience

As if political betrayal were not enough, nature too tested us. Fires, floods, storms—each swept through the camps, reducing huts to ashes and forcing us to discover resilience amid ruin. If the politics of exile did not crush us, disasters threatened to. Life in the camps meant living always on the edge of calamity. The huts we called home were fragile things, woven of bamboo and plastic, unable to withstand fire, storm, or flood.

The worst came on the evening of March 1, 2008. A great fire swept through Goldhap camp. In a matter of hours, 1,304 huts burned to the ground. What had once been a settlement alive with families, voices, and cooking fires became a field of ashes. I was living in Birtamod at the time. When I arrived the next morning, the sight was unbearable: charred frames of homes, children’s faces streaked with soot and tears, families bent over ruins searching for pots, bangles, schoolbooks—anything that might have survived.

The fire left people naked, stripped not only of documents and possessions but of memory itself. Nature had turned everything to cinders, sparing only a few metal utensils and scraps of jewelry. Some bent so deeply in the ashes it seemed as though they were searching for their very fate.

And yet, even in this destruction, solidarity arose. Locals, schools, social organizations, businessmen, politicians—all came forward with help. Relief arrived swiftly. In those moments, Nepali society showed its truest character: in the face of suffering, it did not remain silent.

Two years later, another fire struck Goldhap again. By then, many began to ask: were these fires accidents, or something more sinister? Whatever the cause, the effect was the same. Families who had already lost everything once, lost it again. For some, it meant becoming refugees three times over.

But fire was not our only enemy. Monsoon rains flooded paths, collapsing toilets and filling huts with mud. Storms tore roofs away as if they were paper. Winters pressed down with bitter cold, and we shivered beneath thin “dog blankets” that offered little warmth. In these conditions, disease thrived: cholera, diarrhea, malaria, typhoid—claiming the smallest children first.

To live in the camps was to live with constant fear. At night, when the wind howled, we lay awake, afraid the hut would collapse. When smoke rose, our hearts pounded with the memory of fire. Every cough carried the shadow of disease.

And yet—even as disaster swept through our lives—resilience grew. Refugees rebuilt huts, cleaned drains, fetched water, and reopened schools. Women wove mats and patched roofs; men gathered bamboo and thatch; children studied under makeshift tarpaulins. Festivals returned, lamps glowed, and songs rose again from the silence.

Disaster taught us a harsh truth: we had nothing, and yet we had everything. We had no land, no property, no flag to claim. But we had courage, solidarity, and the stubborn will to continue. Each time fire reduced us to ashes, we rose again. Each time the storm broke our shelters, we rebuilt.

This, then, was what it meant to be a refugee: to live always one step away from loss, and yet to keep going—to carry hope even in the ruins.

Lessons of Refugee Life and Gratitude to Nepal

Through political failures and natural disasters, through silence and ashes, refugee life became a relentless teacher. From it, we carried lessons of survival, of solidarity, of resilience—and above all, an enduring gratitude to Nepal, which gave us shelter when we had none.

Refugee life stripped us of many things—comfort, wealth, dignity, achievement. Yet it also gave us instruction harsher and deeper than any classroom could. It taught us to survive on little, to stretch a handful of rice into a meal, to arrange an entire family within the narrow walls of a single hut. It taught us to endure insult, rejection, and contempt without letting go of our humanity. It taught us that without a flag, one carries the wound of statelessness in the heart each day.

Refugee life revealed the meaning of silence—a silence pressed upon us by loss, by displacement, by waiting without answers. But in that silence, we learned patience. We discovered hidden reserves of strength—the resilience to rise from ashes again and again.

We learned solidarity. Families shared food when rations ran short. Neighbors raised each other’s huts from the ground after storms. Teachers labored for almost nothing to keep schools alive. Festivals were celebrated together, even when poverty left us with barely enough to eat. In hardship, we discovered the true weight of community.

These are not lessons written in books. They are lessons carved into memory by hunger, by fire, by exile. They are lessons we carry wherever we go.

And through it all, we never forgot Nepal. This land, which once cradled our ancestors, opened its arms when we had nowhere else to turn. On its soil, our huts rose, our schools opened, our children grew. Nepal carried us when we had no ground to stand on.

Now I have come to the end of this writing. How heartless it would be not to remember Nepal—the land that gave us shelter and support in our time of disaster. Nepal is the land of our ancestors. Somewhere in its hills and streams lie hidden caves that may still hold the fragile remains of their bones, the traces of umbilical cords buried by our forefathers. Somewhere in its ridges and slopes remain their footprints impressed into history, their faint outlines blurred by time.

Perhaps it is by this ancestral bond that Nepal has shown us more love than refugees are often given. Blessed is Sagarmatha, which gave us refuge in disaster. Blessed is Lumbini. Blessed are the rivers Mechi and Kali. Blessed are Jhapa and Morang, where we built our huts and lit our lamps in the dark.

Refugee life is not one story but many: of suffering and resilience, of betrayal and solidarity, of silence and song, of ashes and renewal. It is a story still unfinished, scattered now across continents, yet bound by memory.

And so I close: refugee life was a dependent existence but also a lesson in survival, in patience, in hope. Even without a flag, even in the smallest hut, even in silence, we carried within us the unbroken will to live.