Editors' Note: — Many of us are able to recall a time when we faced an experience that touched not just our heart, but reached into the depths of our soul, an experience so moving that we knew it would remain for a lifetime. These emotionally charged experiences often are so stunning that they shake our tenets and foundations, bringing about a sense of isolation, longing, perhaps helplessness. Yet, these moments are life-defining. Such is the story of Jacob Conklin, a young man who left his college town in the far northeastern United States and traveled to the Andean mountains in Peru. While there, he studied a disease called bartonellosis.

On his return to Colby College in Waterville, Maine, Conklin wrote his story about the summer of 1998. He struggled to describe his newfound awareness of Peru and the shame he said he felt at his prior lack of understanding about the world outside his own. Conklin's stay solidified his decision to make international health his life's work. Commenting on his adventure, he said: "Through such experiences, we may even discover what people spend entire lives searching for: who we are, and who we want to be.” Here is his story.

As the breeze cradles my face this early evening, I stare into the unknown. Before I went to Peru, this mystery never before had presented itself to me. I had been shielded from the rest of the world by the borders of my native country. While the world was brought to life through multimedia and advanced satellite networking, everything seemed guided by television's sitcom quality and the Internet. The world around me was like the unfolding of a motion-picture drama of people who never existed struggling through a life of conditions too bizarre to be true. Never were there global consequences to actions.

Now I can't help but wonder how I missed it before. This evening, I open my backpack and shuffle through the books. I find my Peru journal—75 days of writing that detail the most ideologically moving summer of my life. I take it out and flip through the pages.

Like Father, Like Son

I stop on a page where I see the name Álvaro. Álvaro is the first son of Nelson Solórzano, a local Peruvian who served as chief contact for our project's research people. Never before had I met a man so true of heart and so unconditionally kind as Nelson. Only nine years my senior, Nelson was truly one of the few people in the world I could look up to for his ability to blend professionalism so easily with humanity in the world of medicine. Although he was not a physician, I can only hope to be as good a healer in my medical future as he is today.

My journal entry suggests that Álvaro was not a very punctual baby, and three days after he was due, the hospital's physicians made the decision that Álvaro needed to arrive. Late one evening, Nelson and his wife were told that a cesarean birth might be necessary. The next day in my journal, I wrote:

The Solórzanos finally had their first baby—a big, quiet baby boy. I could see the sparkle in Nelson's eye as he held his son.

Álvaro taught me a unique lesson today. All my life I have had this goal in my mind, a focus on how I wanted to live, what I have wanted to do—everything I've wanted to be. But as I looked into the arms of Nelson and his wife, I can only wonder how I ever thought I could find happiness leaving that out of my life. I had always wanted to create miracles. How did I ever overlook the most wonderful miracle of all?

In only his first day of life, Álvaro has already taught me something. Like father, like son, I guess.

Lessons come in all shapes and sizes. They tactfully intrude upon a psyche just when everything has been figured out in the world.

As I skipped forward in the journal, I came across a dried eucalyptus leaf pressed between two pages, and as I began to read an entry I recalled the sorrow I felt on that day.

The leaf was from a beautiful little village high in the mountains called Pavas. In the past, there had been many cases of bartonellosis and leishmaniasis, both diseases spread by sand flies from this area.

A team of entomologists decided to investigate the sand fly populations there. The trip also would give Nelson and other team members the chance to check on a girl who had been very sick with bartonellosis many months earlier.

Pavas was not an easy place to get to. The narrow road along the way left one constantly three inches from certain death. And once we arrived, it took us nearly an hour to locate any homes, let alone the exact home we were looking for.

As we approached the first home we could find, we searched around for inhabitants. Nobody home. Nelson, though, insisted that he remembered the exact house as being the one that the girl lived in only two months before.

Finally, a man from nearby came to question our reason for being at the abandoned house. Nelson replied with emphasis on the sick child and asked where the family was. The man replied that the little girl died and the family moved away.

I think today was the first time it really hit me how much a life can be so quickly forgotten. It scares me.

A girl died at that house, and nobody can say how or why. Why did her life mean so little that she is remembered only with an unmarked grave, a passing response by a neighbor, and a family long gone?

To this day, I wonder who she was and what she could have grown up to become.

Will somebody remember her 10 years down the road, or will she become just a statistic?

That night, as a slight wind drew in from the mountains, I sat, eucalyptus leaf in hand, and cried for the girl with no name.

The Gift of Hope

Much of my work dealt with interviewing people whose living conditions in one way or another promoted the spread of bartonellosis. Through this work, I got a close-up look at the poverty in which many people of Peru live. This had been why I went to Peru in some stereotypical first-world sense—to be moved to action by the poverty around me. Little did I know that what would be the defining moment in my summer would have nothing to do with pity, and everything to do with pride.

On an early August day, we traveled to the village of Conchup. There, we had eight family households to interview in one day, about our average number. The days had begun to blend together as had the people. But one house, the fourth on this day, I will never forget.

Upon arriving at the house, I noticed the incredible poverty and living conditions. Eight people greeted us, and all lived in one room made of adobe with dirt floors and tile roofing. Outside were numerous animals, which seemed to go anywhere and do anything. Nothing was really too new about the scene. A lot of houses look this way in Conchup, and everywhere else for that matter.

As we talked to the parents at the house, the numerous children sneered, joked, ran in and out of the house, and darted away from our smiling faces. Only one young girl remained with her mother while we talked. She seemed quite curious about everything, and finally at one point disappeared from the room.

Just as we were about to leave, the girl returned with cobs of boiled corn for each of us. She raised the dish to each member of the group, and each member thankfully took the food. She finally came to me, and as I took a piece of corn, I noticed something I'd never noticed before.

I believe it was at that moment that I finally saw what I had been sent to see—not the incredible poverty before me or the unsanitary conditions existing there. Instead, it was in the girl's eyes. As she stared up at the gruff, blond gringo with two days of stubble and a ridiculous hat, she showed me the way to a truth that I had always known, but never understood. In her eyes was hope—the hope of a child untouched by the world's limitations, the boundaries of finance, or the borderline of color and nationality. In a pair of young eyes I saw a sparkle of her ability to go anywhere and do anything.

Will her potential ever be realized? Probably not. On that day, to this day, and forever, she will have made a difference in my life, and will be an integral part of how I choose to lead it. Because of the hope in her eyes, I want to spend the rest of my life finding a way for the unlimited dreams of children to come true—because no dream should be taken for granted.

A World of Dreams

There is no doubt in my mind that the actions we take affect the lives of so many others globally. The only thing that keeps this world from being one world politically, socially, economically, and medically is our fear of knowing how different things really are. We live in a world of perception limited by national borders. My dream is to live in a world limited only by dreams.

The future is soon to be filled with our actions and achievements. But we must decide whether it will be awareness or security that bridges the gap. Our hearts, I believe, mirror our brains, in that we use only 3 to 4 percent of their true capacity.

My name is Jacob Conklin, and I spent the summer in Peru—a summer that opened my heart to a people holding onto hope, my eyes to a world immersed in difference, and my mind to the infinite possibilities that a world of open hearts, eyes, and minds can contemplate.

My name is Jacob Conklin, and I don't know the road ahead. But I have every reason to believe I'm in for an adventure.

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The author is completing his undergraduate studies in chemistry and applying to medical school. As a doctor, he plans to devote his life to "bringing a higher quality and greater accessibility to primary health care in third world nations."