POOR PATIENTS—A patient at the Rokpa Medical Clinic in Tibet thanks Portlander Dana Bacharach, right, for washing her feet and trimming her nails. Bacharach and nursing student Rosie Wilson, above left, were part of a team that spent three and a half weeks volunteering at the Tibet medical clinic last summer.

Portland teen inspired to aid Tibetans

By Deborah Moon

Last summer Portland teen Dana Bacharach spent nearly a month living in primitive conditions in a remote Tibetan school volunteering at a medical clinic. She still wants to help, but since returning “would be hard to do, ” she is raising money to help meet the dire needs she saw there.

“We were living in their living conditions—no toilet, open sewage, one faucet … we all got sick from the food,” said Bacharach, 17, a junior at Lincoln High School. “I didn’t have time to adjust. This is what you have to do; there is nowhere to go. It’s a 16-hour bus ride from China.”

Bacharach and her brother Ariel, 19, accompanied their mother Sheila Rittenberg and her friend Dr. Dan Fohrman to eastern Tibet to volunteer at the Rokpa Medical Clinic at the Rokpa School near Yushu town in Yushu province, considered one of the poorest and most isolated areas in the China. The team from Rokpa Canada included five doctors, an occupational therapist, a physical therapist, a nursing student and lay volunteers.

“Everyone there was in dire need; everyone was very poor; everyone needed help,” said Bacharach. “On the other side, it is such a rich, rich culture.”

In addition to spending their days helping the doctors treat 60 patients a day, Bacharach and her brother also saw the famed horse festival and a llama dance, spent a day teaching English to young monks at the monastery, and visited discos in Yushu town, which was a 15-minute walk from the school.

Bacharach said she was told the Chinese had paved streets and built buildings (including an Internet café) in Yushu in anticipation of the horse festival, which comes to Yushu town every 12 years. She said they were very lucky to be there for the ornate and acrobatic festival.

“The town is somewhat industrialized and has buildings that aren’t just huts,” she said. “But it is very poor. There are beggars everywhere, trash everywhere and kids squat in the middle of the street to go to the bathroom.”

“There was nowhere to go so we had to accept it and learn to live for three and half weeks,” she said. “But it was horrid and it was a culture shock.”

Still, Bacharach said she misses the beautiful scenery and the simple, appreciative people.

“I was more relaxed than I’ve ever been and more open to new ideas,” she said. “When you’re put in that situation, you are compelled to be as they are—simple, relaxed, serene.”

Bacharach attributed her ability to go out into the world and help others to the Jewish values instilled in her by Portland Jewish Academy (which she attended through eighth-grade), her parents (Sheila Rittenberg and Alan Bacharach), her bat mitzvah studies at the Egalitarian shul and as a four-year board member on the Oregon Jewish Community Youth Foundation.

“This is a part of the world that has been trampled on,” she said. “Their Buddhist values don’t coincide with the way their culture has been treated. They are a poor people who need help and they appreciate it.”

She said she felt the deepest appreciation when she washed and trimmed neglected nails on women’s feet.

“It’s one of the worst things I’ve done,” she said. “With toe nails that seemed to have not been cut for years and black grime masking their feet, we literally had to scrub with anti-fungal shampoo to clean the patient’s feet. The foot care in and of itself was indescribably awful, but the praise and thanks we received always seemed to make up for the hard work.”

“You feel you are doing so much, but you feel there is still so much more you could do,” she said.

Volunteers pay all their own expenses, and medicines and some supplies are donated, but Bacharach said so much more could be done with more money. The team took crutches and wheelchairs to Tibet,
but when one little girl needed a walker, Ariel bought hardware and lumber in town and built one. Many of the clinic’s patients needed surgery, which was available in town if patients could pay.

“We turned down a lot of patients who needed surgery because we simply didn’t have the funds,” she said. “With more money there was so much more to be done. We could pay for surgery by Chinese doctors at the hospital in town.”

She said she went to Tibet because she felt compelled to help. After returning to Portland, she said she realized how much more could be accomplished through tzedakah. Through her experiences on the OJCYF board, she said she realized what an impact money can have.

“I think Jewish people are philanthropists because we are brought up to help people in more need than ourselves,” she said.

So Bacharach is hopeful that the Jewish community will turn out at the Feb. 24 fund-raiser she has created to raise funds for next year’s Rokpa Canada medical team to take to the clinic in Tibet. “My Tibet: Pictures and Stories of a Journey to Heal” will begin at 11:30 a.m., Feb. 24 at Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st Ave. For information, email Bacharach at danab31@gmail.com.

Since Cinema 21 donated the space and her parents are paying to rent the equipment for the program, all proceeds will go to Tibetan medical relief, she said.

“I really would like the Jewish community, which I have been raised by and has helped form rudimentary ideals in me, to come,” she said. “I think it is something everyone should see … so they see how lucky they are and appreciate what they have.”

She said the volunteer translators at the clinic were Rokpa School graduates who were certified in Tibetan medicine but unable to practice under Chinese law.

“I was moved by the translators,” she said. “They give back when they don’t have money. We have time and money and we should be doing more to help people who can’t help themselves.”