In February 1990, Dr Linea Smith, a doctor from USA went to Peru on a vacation. During her stay at a remote Amazon jungle lodge and with the desire to help people, Smith decided to leave behind her successful medical practice in Wisconsin and start a clinic deep in the Amazon. She spoke no Spanish, and the lodge that she had earlier visited allowed her to use a thatch-roofed hut as clinic space. There was no running water or electricity and the only medical equipment was her stethoscope and a few basic supplies that she brought with her.
By the time a year had passed, she was seeing 100 patients a month for free, almost all of them poor, acutely ill, and with no other available source of medical care. A Rotary Club in Minnesota heard about her and sent a crew down to Peru to build a small clinic on the bank of the river and a little thatched-roof house as a home for Linea. Her services include pre-natal & birth control care, delivering babies, snake and alligator bites, machete wounds, dental care, malaria treatment and much more.
Tourists left donations and medical supplies and about 1997 a couple of her friends from the US started a non-profit foundation, The Amazon Medical Project to support her clinic.
Dr Smith writes a regular news letter that she eventually compiled into a book called La Doctora, which chronicles the joys and challenges of life in one of the world’s last frontiers.
She is known for her lack of materialism and her cheerful, but no-nonsense attitude. She says, “I love waking up and hearing the sounds of the birds and bugs and frogs, and sometimes a troop of monkeys in the palm trees behind my house, and the sound of the heavy rain on my thatched roof”.
Lew Pulbrook, from Amigos Travel, says “Linea is an inspiration to us, but to the people of the Amazon, she is a life saver. I feel privileged to be able to call Linea a close friend”.
Amigos Travel visit Dr Smith and her clinic on many of their tours.
