Purna Gurung and Hem Gurung stood in dung-slopped boots and rubber gloves, the heady perfume of wet cow, raw milk and manure permeating the room. They washed down the dirty stalls in the rotary milking parlour at Noblehurst Farms in western New York, some 7,500 miles from their birthplace in Bhutan.
“Everything here looks good to me,” Purna Gurung, 52, said in Nepali, through an interpreter. “It’s hard work here, but I am happier than being in the refugee camp. Now I have everything for my family.”
The men were once farmers, and then spent 20 years in refugee camps in Nepal, unable to hold legal jobs. Now they worked alongside two other milkers, both Mexican immigrants.
The raw product will soon supply a cross-cultural dairy case: Siggi’s, an Icelandic-style yogurt; Norman’s Greek yogurt; and eggnog for Pittsford Farms Dairy.
Hem and Purna Gurung (no relation) are among 23 Bhutanese refugees who have taken part in a state programme, learning to be milkers at Alfred State College and then training on local farms. The Refugee Milker Training Programme began in 2014 out of mutual need: Refugees in Rochester wanted familiar agrarian jobs, and farms needed labour to fuel the yogurt boom. Since then, it has evolved into a modest social experiment in the state’s dairy heartland.
It is an irony that Bhutan, a country devoted to gross national happiness (as opposed to gross national product), expelled 100,000 people of Nepalese ancestry living in southern Bhutan in the 1990s during a period of ethnic cleansing. Since 2011, nearly 40,000 Bhutanese refugees have settled across the U.S, in cities like Akron, Ohio; Houston; and Buffalo. In Rochester, the Bhutanese are the largest refugee group, numbering about 2,000, according to the resettlement agency there, Catholic Family Center. Pat Standish, a leader in the region, made the connection bridging the Bhutanese and farming communities. Twenty years ago, Standish founded the non-profit group Community Action Angels to help residents contend with poverty, literacy and a lack of jobs. In late 2013, working with the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Wyoming County, she contacted the Catholic Family Center to enrol the first participants in the milker programme, for which she obtained an initial grant. The state’s Office for New Americans provided $400,000 to help run the pilot programme for two years.
Her first hire was Manoj Rai, who had recently moved to Rochester after first landing in Richmond, Virginia, to stay with a brother. Rai, 41, would serve as an interpreter, mentor and liaison. He called himself a “guardian” of his people.
For the first two winters, Rai and the milkers made the treacherous hour-long drive from Rochester to the farms and back to work. The refugees had lived in Bhutan’s tropical region, not the northern Himalayas. They had never owned cars, let alone driven in blinding snow squalls. He was the first to move, in September 2014. Five other families have followed him to the village of Warsaw, population 3,814. Most moved into homes owned by Action Angels. They cut their commute to 20 minutes.
Slowly. the refugees are adapting to their new lives.
“I feel this is a wonderful place,” Rai said of Warsaw. Now, 27 Bhutanese immigrants live here, with 10 children attending the local schools.
Kaji Rai, 35, who works at the farm Synergy, said moving closer had relaxed him, and not just because he drove fewer miles.
The Action Angels, a division of Community Action for Wyoming County, has served as a secondary refugee agency for the Bhutanese, offering ESL classes, paying their first month’s rent and providing furniture. When Kaji Rai could not find a used trumpet for Binuphsa, his 10-year-old daughter, to take lessons, Standish assembled an entire band’s worth of donated instruments.
The pilot programme expires in December, and if not renewed, Standish said, she was determined to keep it running.— New York Times News Service
It’s hard work here, but I am happier than being in the refugee camp. Now I have everything for my family
