• Camas High School
• Call: Medical care for the impoverished
Political tensions compelled Tenzin Lama’s family to leave their home in Nepal two years ago and seek a more stable life in the United States.
Lama, 19, is Tibetan, but she lived most of her life in Nepal and India before emigrating to the U.S. with her family in 2011.
Feeling discriminated against in Nepal, and with political upheavals facing both that country and India at the time, her family moved to America to seek a fresh start. This month, she will graduate from Camas High School.
Lama views her new country as a place of promise — a place where anyone can give back.
“In the U.S., if you’re born here, you can run for president, right?” she said. “Over there, they say: ‘You’re Tibetan, so we don’t care about you.'”
As she looks toward her future, Lama reflects on her past. She’s seen a lot of poverty through her travels — even in the U.S. — and wants to do something to curb it. She plans to enter the medical profession and help the less fortunate.
“I’m really looking forward to helping people,” Lama said. “Because I’m Tibetan, I’ve seen a lot of suffering around the world.”
She’s always wanted to help people from lower incomes, she said. In the U.S., it’s a particularly pressing problem because so many people are without health insurance.
But she doesn’t want to forget about the people in her home country, either.
When she thinks of the Tibetan community and how bad the conditions are, with limited sanitation and few doctors, she knows she’ll have to return one day when she’s working in the medical profession.
For now, however, she plans to attend Washington State University, where she’ll start down the path toward service by majoring in pre-medicine.
