154: New Hampshire — Part 2: Early State Mini-Series with Suraj Budathoki (Bernie Sanders Campaign) from Model Majority Podcast

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154: New Hampshire — Part 2: Early State Mini-Series with Suraj Budathoki (Bernie Sanders Campaign)

21 minutes Posted Jan 14, 2020 at 3:10 pm.

] Kevin: Today, we are going to talk about New Hampshire as part of a special Mini-Series we are  doing on the Model Majority Podcast to profile the four early states in the Democratic Primary from the perspective of Asian-American staffers currently working on a presidential campaign in one of these states. And today I am delighted to welcome Suraj Budathoki, who is the Constituency Director in New Hampshire for the Bernie Sanders campaign.

] Suraj is a co-founder and a former executive director of Building Community in New Hampshire, which is a nonprofit serving refugee and immigrant populations. As a former refugee from Bhutan, he also founded the International Campaign for Human Rights in Bhutan and as a member of the Conduct Board for the City of Manchester.

] Suraj, welcome to the Model Majority Podcast today. 

] Suraj: Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to come to your podcast. 

] Kevin: Thank you! The pleasure is ours. So let’s start by talking actually about how you settled in New Hampshire from Bhutan by way of Nepal, I believe, as a refugee. How did that story came about?

] Suraj: That is I think 19 years worth of a story, but let me brief. Yes. I was born in Bhutan. So it’s a very small country in between India and China. So many Western people or Western countries they might not know about Bhutan. Well, if they know it, if they know it as the happiest country on earth, the youngest democracy or the last Shangri-la.

] But as you know, I was one of the refugees from Bhutan and that is everything what we understood as, you know, Bhutan. So in 1990s when Bhutan, the government of Bhutan, changed many sensitive laws and expelled me, my family, and more than 100,000 ethnic Nepalese from Bhutan who were Bhutanese citizens.

] So ended up in Bhutan, sorry in Nepal, beginning from 1990s to 2009, I was a in refugee camp in Nepal. So I don’t have to explain to you the hardship, the problem that refugees go through in their refugee life or in their refugee camps. But in 2007, when the United States came up with the idea of resettling about 60,000 Bhutanese refugees to the United States, that gave me a sort of hope to rebuild my life in America.

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Suraj Budathoki, Constituency Director of New Hampshire for the Bernie Sanders Campaign, joins us for Part 2 of our Early State Mini-Series to talk about his incredible journey from being refugee in Bhutan and Nepal to New Hampshire, and how to do politics in the “Live Free or Die” state.

Listen to other episodes of this series on: Iowa, Nevada, Caucus 101.

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Transcript (lightly edited for clarity)

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