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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0A 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Dr Smith writes a regular news letter that she eventually compiled into a book called La Doctora, <\/em>which chronicles the joys and challenges of life in one of the world\u2019s last frontiers.<\/p>\n She is known for her lack of materialism and her cheerful, but no-nonsense attitude. She says, \u201cI 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\u201d.<\/p>\n Lew Pulbrook, from Amigos Travel, says \u201cLinea 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\u201d.<\/p>\n Amigos Travel visit Dr Smith and her clinic on many of their tours.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":734,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-south-america","latest_post"],"yoast_head":"\n