2004 Olympics: Other Sports

Athens residents befriend tiny country's five-member delegation

08:57 PM CDT on Thursday, August 26, 2004

By THOMAS HUANG / The Dallas Morning News

ATHENS, Greece – This feels like home: the gentle laughter, good-natured teasing and dinner plates full of red rice, chicken curry and pork with chili peppers. If she closes her eyes, Tshering Chhoden can imagine returning to her beloved mountains.

The 24-year-old Olympic archer misses Bhutan, a tiny country nestled in the eastern Himalayas. She's been gone for two months. But thanks to an unlikely group of strangers in Athens, Chhoden and the Bhutanese Olympic delegation have found friendship thousands of miles from their homeland.

"It's so good that some people who I don't know, they treat us so good," she says. "It's amazing."

On this recent night, Athens resident Romolo Gandolfo and his wife, Olga Malea, are hosting a dinner at their home to celebrate their guests' Olympic fortune. A dozen friends and the five-member Bhutanese delegation feast on home-cooked Bhutanese and Greek specialties and toast one another with Moet & Chandon champagne.

Last week, Chhoden and fellow archer Tashi Peljor, the only two athletes from Bhutan, upset heavily favored opponents in their event's first round. They were knocked out in the next round.

But it's the furthest any Bhutanese athlete has gone in the Olympics since the country began fielding an archery team in 1984. Archery is their national sport, although in Bhutan they use traditional bamboo bows and arrows, and shoot at smaller, more distant targets.

At Panathinaiko Stadium, Gandolfo and 40 other fans roared for the Bhutanese archers. "We saw them welcoming us, lots of them with our flag, cheering for us. I was so happy and so proud. We hardly knew them," Chhoden says.

"I was surprised we had so many friends in Greece," says Karma Dechog, 31, Bhutan's archery coach. In addition to the coach and the archers, the visiting delegation includes the secretary general of the Bhutan Olympic Committee and the secretary general of the Bhutan Archery Federation.

Gandolfo, 47, is the mastermind behind the Greek-Bhutanese friendship society. He became enchanted with the kingdom of Bhutan when he was a boy in Italy. He learned about the land from watching a TV documentary almost 35 years ago.

"I became intrigued, but the encyclopedia was short on information," says Gandolfo, a former journalist who works in newspaper and magazine publishing. "It was a mysterious country. It had just built its first roads, schools and hospitals. But it was not primitive." So began a life-long passion to learn all about Bhutan.

In Milan, Gandolfo did his undergraduate thesis on the country's modernization. He has visited the country three times. Bhutan, half the size of Indiana, is located between Tibet and India. Estimates for its population range from 800,000 to 2 million. It is ruled by a monarchy, though the country is going through democratic reforms. The economy is one of the smallest and least developed in the world.

The country first opened its doors to outsiders in the early '70s. It remains hard to travel to – about 10,000 visitors get visas each year. Most Bhutanese still live in small villages. Many are farmers or cattle and yak breeders. Historically, the Bhutanese have referred to their country as Druk Yul, or Land of the Thunder Dragon.

When Gandolfo visits Bhutan again in October, he'll receive the royal treatment. "What Romolo did for us here," says Peljor, 26, "we'll do the same for him."

At the dinner party, the guests sit outside on a patio under the leaves of trees. They joke about opening a Greek restaurant in Bhutan and a Bhutanese restaurant in Athens. They compare notes. No, there's no McDonald's in Bhutan, but there is a pizza place. Chhoden admits that she has come to love French fries. "We're going to adopt you," one woman tells Chhoden. "You can represent Greece in the next Olympics."

The delegation, which left Bhutan in July to train in the Netherlands, will depart from Athens on Monday. "I'll be happy to go home, but it will be a very sad moment, because of the closing of the Olympics," says Dechog.

Then it's time to go. The Bhutanese give their Greek friends small bags of traditional red rice. Crying, they hug one another. "I've never come across such people in my life," Dechog says. "These people, they won't let us miss our home."

E-mail thuang@dallasnews.com