Carmen Duarte (Arizona Daily Star)
Bhutanese refugees Yamuna Gajmer, left, and her sister, Barsika, will perform at the 2nd Annual Tucson World Refugee Fest 6/20/09 (A.E. Araiza/Arizona Daily Star).
TUCSON, Arizona -- Sisters Yamuna and Barsika Gajmer are Bhutanese of Nepali descent, who along with their parents and older brother, were forced to live in a refugee camp in Nepal for 18 years.
The government of the Hima-layan Buddhist kingdom of Bhu-tan forced the Gajmer family, among some 133,000 refugees, into seven refugee camps in Nepal since the 1990s that are administered by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. They lived in bamboo huts in a tropical lowland region in the country couched between India and China. They were forced into exile, their rights eroded, in an ethnic-cleansing by the government in an effort to create "one nation, one people," according to the story "Bhutanese Refugees: The Story of a Forgotten People" (bhutaneserefugees.com).
The sisters, their parents, Lal and Man Kumari Gajmer, and their brother, Hem Gajmer, resettled in Tucson two weeks ago with the aid of the International Rescue Committee, a nonprofit organization that is among... More>>
