Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan

Her tales of the school children in the village of Pema Gatshel are both amusing & heartwarming. This is a society where children revere their teachers. Jamies acknoledges that that these children have taught her a lot more than she was able to teach them.

A must for anyone with an interest in Bhutan, the Himalayan region, Buddhism & teaching in a foreign country.


Beautiful Travel Writing   March 5, 2000
J. Marren (Glen Ridge, NJ USA)
18 out of 20 found this review helpful

I loved this book. A wonderful example of personal travel writing--a very personal memoir. In addition to beautifully describing the countryside, some of her insights were quite interesting--the lack of privacy in the culture, the obedience to authority. Her appreciation of and eventual conversion to Buddhism helped me really understand in a very different way the nature of this most un-western form of spirituality. I too was a little disappointed in the second half of the book where her falling in love interferes with the very compelling story of ethnic tensions, and I did think the ending was a bit of a cop out--"oh,well--cultural differences"--unexplained reason for her separation. Still, having been to Nepal and seeing just a glimpse of the things she writes about, a must read for people visiting that part of the world.


Bhutan through the eyes of a self-centered writer   February 8, 2000
saskatoonguy (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Canada)
17 out of 32 found this review helpful

Jamie Zeppa joined the Canadian equivalent of the Peace Corp to experience life as a teacher in Bhutan. We see the experience through her eyes--the culture shock, followed by her enchantment with these innocent, nonmaterialistic people. Then, she's transferred from a remote elementary school to a college (actually more of a secondary school), where she becomes aware of the ethnic and religious conflict (Buddhist vs Hindu). Some of her students are taken by the police in the night for questioning and worse. However, it's hard to like this writer. It's surprising that she's unaware of the Hindu-Buddhist conflict until page 190 of the book. She unthinkingly gets involved in a religious protest; she ignores her closest friend during the friend's personal crisis. She has sex with two of her students, but this doesn't seem to bother her because she sees her desires as pure. One wonders what would happen to a secondary teacher in her hometown that decided to sleep with students, but Zeppa gives little thought of how her actions affect others. She gets pregnant, married, and separated. The book is an interesting introduction to Bhutan, but the author seems unaware of how badly she comes across.


A* MAJOR* Letdown   August 4, 2004
JN9000 (USA)
14 out of 30 found this review helpful

Books about the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan are rare, so it was with great eagerness that I read this book. Boy, what a letdown.

The author spent some time in Bhutan, sometime few westerns get to do even if they would like given that the country is careful about how open to the rest of the world it wants to be, teaching. Initially we get a very interesting account of her adjustments and culture shock, but eventually the book becomes remarkably self absorbed, especially when she transfers to teach at a college elsewhere in Bhutan and begins sleeping with some of her students. Her breathtakingly indifference to this reprehensibly unprofessional behavior is compounded by the fact that her only concern is that she will be caught? Why is she so concerned? Undoubtedly because she knows that this would lead to her dismissal because of the unprofessional nature of these actions, yet she continues on because, well, her own desires are more important to her than ethics.

But this is not all. By the second half of the book Zeppa has become highly critical of many of the values and priorities of western culture (not a hard thing to do, and I'll grant her that much) but she then turns around and applies western values and priorities as a way to criticize aspects of Bhutanese culture, most particularly some of the policies of the school where she teaches. Which is it?

In the end Zeppa comes across as little more than a self absorbed, whiney and spoiled westerner. So smug, self righteous, and ultimately looking for validation of her own behavior. Pass.


Too Self Centered   March 20, 2000
13 out of 19 found this review helpful

It is difficult to imagine how someone who spent three years teaching in a geographically isolated, culturally unfamiliar, and economically impoverished country could possibly come across as shallow and self centered, but Jamie Zeppa manages to pull it off in her book "Beyond the Sky and the Earth : A Journey into Bhutan."

A Canadian, Zeppa began her journey as a teacher in Bhutan teaching young children in the eastern part of that country. The first half of the book covers those experiences as well as her efforts to deal with the inevitable culture shock, and adjustments to her unfamiliar surroundings. She covers this material reasonably effectively as she slowly begins to adjust to her new life and falls in love with the nation of Bhutan and its people.

But things go woefully wrong in the second half when she gets transferred to teach at a college in the western section of the country. Here Zeppa seems to want to have it both ways - developing a somewhat snide attitude towards the western values she left behind in Canada while at the same time using those values to come dangerously close to passing judgment on many aspects of Bhutanese culture. Even worse is the uncaring attitude she takes concerning the sexual relationships she develops with not one, but two, of her students (one is a one night stand, the other an ongoing relationship which eventually results in pregnancy). This behavior on her part results in uneasiness and apprehension, not because of its thoroughly unprofessional nature, but because she seemingly is only worried about being caught. By this point the book has taken on a rather unpleasant tone in which Zeppa seems more interested in talking about herself than about the nation of Bhutan and her observations there.

This is unfortunate as the premise of this book could have resulted in compelling reading. Maybe there is one out there.