WARSAW, N.Y. — 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 parlor 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 more happy 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 wordlessly alongside two other milkers, both Mexican immigrants, in practiced repetition.
The raw product would soon supply a cross-cultural dairy case: Siggi’s, an Icelandic-style yogurt; Norman’s kosher 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 program, learning to be milkers at Alfred State College and then training on local farms.
The Refugee Milker Training Program began in 2014 out of mutual need: Refugees in Rochester wanted familiar agrarian jobs, and farms needed labor to fuel the yogurt boom. Since then, it has evolved into a modest social experiment in the state’s dairy heartland.
It is a cruel irony that Bhutan has become known as a country devoted to gross national happiness (as opposed to gross national product), considering that more than 100,000 people of Nepalese ancestry living in Southern Bhutan were expelled by the king in the 1990s during a period of ethnic cleansing.
Since 2011, nearly 40,000 Bhutanese refugees have settled across the United States, 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, an indefatigable leader in the region, made the connection bridging the Bhutanese and farming communities.
Source:https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/27/nyregion/from-bhutan-to-new-yorks-dairy-heartland.html
