Bhawani Dangal often looked at the rivers in Concord and couldn’t help but to compare them to those in Bhutan. In his home country, the river currents moved fast and often flooded even faster.
The water in Bhutan was clear enough to see the riverbed and clean enough to drink it straight from the source. He remembered early mornings in his childhood when his mom sang songs while traveling down to the river to collect water for the day.
He hasn’t been back to Bhutan since he was seven years old, when he and his family fled the country amid conflict.
“I wish even today that I still was able to live in Bhutan,” Dangal said through an interpreter. “It really is such a beautiful country, a beautiful landscape. It’s a very close-knit community. Everyone supports each other. Everyone helps each other out.”
He spent two decades in Nepal, during which time he completely lost his hearing. In the years since, Dangal taught himself sign language and became a teacher himself while advocating for the deaf refugee community in Concord.
His journey is chronicled in the book “Down the Braided River,” a biography several years in the making with the help of local advocates and interpreters. The book is set to be published Dec. 1.
Julia Freeman-Woolpert remembered meeting Dangal shortly after he arrived in Concord in 2011 — and, at the time, neither of them really knew American Sign Language. Through her work as outreach advocacy director for the Disability Rights Center, Freeman-Woolpert encountered many new Americans and helped them access resources. She watched firsthand how Dangal navigated learning ASL, even with a lack of classes available.
“He’s very, very friendly, and he, in spite of all of the language barriers and the culture barriers, he has a very easy time making friends and getting to know people,” she said. “The way that he could make friends, even when people were angry with him or not very nice to him or whatever, he somehow would be able to turn things around so that they ended up being friends, and I thought that was remarkable.”
Dangal learned and taught Nepali Sign Language before arriving in the United States, where he quickly caught on to ASL. He lent his services as a volunteer interpreter for others in the deaf Bhutanese community, helping them go to medical appointments, for example.
Dangal worked as a staunch leader in the deaf Bhutanese-American community and collected many accolades: he graduated from the prestigious Road to Deaf Interpreting program and served on the Board of the Himalayan Foundation USA, in addition to speaking at the first-ever World Refugee Day in 2021 as the keynote speaker.
Talks between Dangal and Freeman-Woolpert about sharing his story began around the COVID-19 pandemic, when Dangal had already relocated to Pennsylvania a couple of years prior. The two of them initially envisioned something along the lines of a short story, but the more they worked together, the more the project ballooned into a 70,000-word book.
“We got to talk every week, and so we were able to keep in touch, even though they had moved to Pennsylvania,” Freeman-Woolpert said. “So it was important to me that we were able to stay connected in that way.”
They used the translating expertise of Mary Hughes and Lesley Richardson, both from New Hampshire, to interpret Dangal’s thoughts for Freeman-Woolpert, who wrote the book.
The pair surmounted some hard work through the process — coordinating Zoom calls, using Hughes and Richardson to translate every word and getting all the minor details down perfectly. But sharing Dangal’s story was important enough to overcome those hurdles.
“By having Mary and Leslie as part of the process, we had a lot of fun just laughing at how the stories morphed and changed and grew in the language, and it was interesting,” Dangal said through an interpreter. “I guess I enjoyed having that company. I enjoyed our time together. It gave me something to do with my mind when I was not at work or not with my family. So it was a really good process for me.”
Hughes first met Dangal when she went through UNH Manchester’s ASL program — and then really connected a couple of years later in her senior year. Richardson, on the other hand, met Dangal’s wife before meeting Dangal himself. Like Freeman-Woolpert, the two women were drawn to Dangal’s story and personality. The four became a core team for the project.
Richardson remembered interpreting at an awards ceremony in a church and seeing a six-foot-tall man, sticking out of the crowd for his height but not necessarily his clothing, which was plainer than most others at the event. She said she was “astounded” by his humbleness at that moment.
“That kind of sparked something in me to want to get to know this man and get to know more about these people, so that I could do my job,” Richardson said. “Through getting to know their food, their customs, their traditions, I became a good friend, and we really became brother and sister.”
Dangal said he hopes his story will shine a light on Bhutanese and Nepali culture, as well as the experience of living in refugee camps and immigrating to the United States. He also hopes interpreting classes for deaf refugees break out of the one-size-fits-all mold he experienced when trying to learn ASL.
“I’m hoping that with more awareness of the deaf refugee experience, interpreter training programs can shed some light on how better to serve those communities, the deaf refugee communities,” Dangal said through an interpreter.
For more information about “Down the Braided River,” visit https://perpublisher.com/portfolio-item/down-the-braided-river/. Dangal and Freeman-Woolpert will have an author presentation at Gibson’s Bookstore on Dec. 1 at 6:30 p.m. Concord TV will also be running a special program about Dangal’s book later this fall.
