The film was a documentary, a day in a Tibetan clinic run by a young Tibetan doctor who was also a woman. Unlike my own clinic, on the first floor of a large concrete building, this clinic was high on a mountainside, reached only by an arduous and steep road. Prayer wheels stood every fifteen or twenty feet along this road, great cylinders covered with sacred words, which people struck in passing, sending them spinning and humming, wafting their blessings like perfume into the morning silence.

As I remember, the film begins at sunrise. The young physician is there in her clinic alone. She starts the day with prayers and then lights a flame in a huge bowl, signifying the opening of the clinic. We began our day at almost the same time with a quick cup of coffee, a sweet roll, and some light banter in the hospital cafeteria. As I watched, I felt a certain attitude begin to come over me, a sort of National Geographic consciousness. An unbridgeable distance started to open between me and the doctor I was watching in the movie.

Then the doors of the clinic were flung wide, and a great river of people flowed in, the old, the hurting, the very young, the dying, as well as the hopeful, anxious others who carried them and supported them. And I knew them. These were the same people I saw in my own clinic. This woman, in this foreign place with the most different of tools, was dealing with the same issues I dealt with every day. Perhaps these issues faced every doctor every day, everywhere. Fascinated, I watched her move through her work, listening, examining, diagnosing, treating, offering hope where there was hope and comfort where there was none. It was utterly and completely familiar and I could not understand a single word that was being said.

The film ends at the close of the clinic day, a time when I and my colleagues sat at our desks scrambling to catch up with our chart work. But the day ended very differently here. High in the mountains the sun is setting. The patients have gone., once again there is silence. The clinic helpers, young men, run swiftly down the road away from the clinic, striking the prayer wheels as they pass. One and then two more. And then a fourth, and a fifth. Then they are gone and the physician is once again alone. As darkness falls she chants a prayer in Tibetan, her words dropping one by one into the valley below. In the silence that follows she reaches out and extinguishes the flame in the great bowl.