S TU D E N T S IN ACT ION
COMING TO AMERICA First-year medical student Prakash Pathak (far left) and his siblings, in the U.S.
PRAKASH WITHOUT BORDERS First-year med student Prakash Pathak shares his journey from refugee camp in southeastern Nepal to the UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences. In a way, it’s appropriate that Prakash
who had immigrated from Nepal to Bhutan
all of us were born,” explained Prakash,
Pathak would end up pursuing medicine.
over the course of several generations. As
noting that the U.N. and other NGOs
tensions rose between the Nepali-speaking
provided education for children in the
immigrants and Bhutanese natives along
camps. “Twenty years. That’s how long my
the border between those nations in the
parents were in the camp, and that’s where
late 20th century, the Kingdom of Bhutan
I went to school.”
“Prakash is a Sanskrit term,” the firstyear medical student told North Dakota Medicine. “And it essentially means light, or you might say sunlight. And my last name means one who teaches.” The teacher of light, or shining instructor. This sounds about right for a bright young man who not long ago took the Hippocratic Oath, which all but mandates physicians to teach their art to those who follow. And Prakash, who is on the process of becoming an American citizen, is today determined to make the most of an opportunity his parents and so many of his countrymen never had. Coming to America Because it was almost not so. Prakash comes from a long line of Nepali language-speaking Bhutanese people,
16
North Dakota Medicine Fall 2020
eventually evicted these “Lhotshampa” (or “southerners”), forcibly sending them back to Nepal.
By 2008, the United States and other Western nations began accepting the refugees, after a long application and vetting
But when Nepal refused the refugees, the
process. Prakash and his family applied for
Lhotshampa found themselves stateless,
resettlement in 2009 and arrived in Grand
and living in camps in southeastern Nepal
Forks in 2011, when he was 15.
that were established by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) in the late 1990s. At their height, these camps housed more than 100,000 Nepali-Bhutanese refugees. So it is that the first-generation college student and son of Bhutanese immigrants spent the first decade and a half of his life in a United Nations refugee camp in Nepal. “That’s where my parents and my grandparents settled, and that’s where
“We just wanted to go to United States—it didn’t matter where,” laughed Prakash, whose extended family was resettled to Ohio. “We didn’t have much control. So they brought us to Grand Forks.” College Bound And he has been here ever since, a proud part of the several hundred-strong Bhutanese community in North Dakota’s third-largest city.
