"It is hard for us to get papers, and we don't get jobs easily," said a woman who sells Tibetan souvenirs in a small market in the Bhutanese capital, Thimphu.
"If we get independence we would like to go back to Tibet," she added. "But if we get ID cards we would probably stay here."
Despite their cultural links, Bhutan's people hardly seem to care about the problems of their Tibetan neighbours, a function of their long isolation in the Himalayas.
But Tibetans say they do mix with Bhutanese people and at least are free to practice their religion inside the country.
"As a refugee life goes, this is not too bad," said one young man.
SCHOOLED IN INDIA
Yet parents usually send their children off from a relatively young age to be educated in Indian towns like Darjeeling and Dharamsala, where Tibetan schools teach them their language and culture and give them the chance for higher education.
Bhutan has a population of less than 700,000 people and after an influx of Tibetans in 1959 it closed its northern borders for fear of being swamped. New refugees are no longer welcome.
Dolker, a 48-year-old farmer's wife says she was born high in the Himalayas, right on the border of Bhutan and Tibet, in the midst of a dangerous and arduous trek to safety.
Today she looks after her 82-year-old mother Choden, but the rest of her family are scattered.
All three of her children, aged 19, 18 and 16, study in Mussoorie in India. She has a younger sister in Canada, and a brother in the Indian Himalayan state of Ladakh.
"The army came and tortured families and the rest had to flee," she said, relating her family's odyssey in 1959 as her lined and hunched mother sat on a bed twisting her prayer beads.
"My parents had many brothers and sisters who were put in prison, and we have never found out what happened to them. We do not know if they lived or died," she said, as her mother looked pained.
The simple, dirt-floored house was decorated with mementoes of her absent children, posters of Arnold Schwarzenegger, crayon drawings of Bhutanese stupas or rural scenes on the walls.
"We always have a little hope, but we are not really sure if freedom is possible," she said.
