DORJE DOLMA'S VISIT

ABOUT

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Dorje’s visit, but after learning so much about her and her story, I was excited for the assembly and for B Block.  I sometimes have trouble getting into articles and books, so when I was immediately captivated by the excerpts we read from her book Yak Girl, I knew that I was going to really enjoy her speaking.  If I was this engaged in the reading, I couldn’t imagine how interesting her speaking would be.  I was really looking forward to hearing about her experiences in person and from her perspective.  After both of these discussions, I was even more interested in her life than I initially had been while doing the readings.  It is such a different experience hearing the person tell their stories personally, as it adds another level of emotion. I was taken aback by her talk because in her book, I felt that she made her experiences sound easier than they were.  When she told her stories, from pulling her little sister out of a fire to standing off to a mountain lion before she was even 10, I realized how much more complicated her life was than I had gathered from the book. Overall, I was very impressed by all that she has been through and how she is still rooted deeply into her own culture despite living in the U.S. and being somewhat adopted by an American family.  
I noticed a lot of differences between Lia Lee’s life and Dorje’s life.  One that I found to be most noticeable was the ages at which they were diagnosed.  While Lia never really knew a life before she got sick, Dorje was still able to function despite her scoliosis.  This difference even made it difficult for me to compare and contrast the two cases initially, because in the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, we are never given Lia’s perspective, while Dorje’s perspective is what drives her memoir.  I also noticed that while Lia’s family was very resistant to western medical care and had a fear of it, Dorje and her family embraced it and seeked out help.  Her father, especially, who worked as a tribal medicine man, understands that he can’t cure everything and that direct medication isn’t always enough. The cases are similar, though, in that they both have deep connections with their culture and have found a balance between their home and the United States. 
Cultural brokers seemed to be a key part of Dorje’s life, especially in her journey to finding help for back.  Her adopted family, the people she met in Kathmandu, helped bridge the gap between Dorje’s home and everything she knew.  In Lia’s situation, the cultural brokers were the doctors themselves. This wasn’t the case with Dorje because her adopted family somewhat played the role as they knew about western medicine as American citizens.