Louis Netzer
NOTE: This is not about Mongolia, it’s about Bolivia, but I’m including it because it’s a Reason To Hope. It’s for readers who sometimes feel, as I do, that there is little reason to hope for a better planet and a better future–specifically, a better American presence abroad. And it’s also for readers who, you know, get off on Paul Farmer.
After spending decades as the last doctor in California’s Santa Ynez Valley willing to make house calls, after starting a home for Alzheimer patients, an elementary school, and a café on the side, Louis Netzer retired and set off not on an ocean cruiser, not on a tour of the world’s greatest golf courses, but on a journey to the far corners of world. He didn’t get any farther than the village of Rurrenebaque on the banks of the Rio Beni, a remote tributary to the Bolivian Amazon. On his annual two-month visits to the Valley in the following years Lou spoke often of his first moments on that smooth river, of the surrounding jungle, of the faces of the warm-hearted local people whose ailments he knew how to cure, of the moments he realized he would be staying until he did cure them. In subsequent years, at talks he gave all over Santa Barbara County raising money for the Rio Beni Health Project, Lou said that he didn’t have hope, because hope implies expectation. He just had faith. Lou’s faith was the power behind his conception of the Project, which began in 1997 with "basically a boat and a motor." Lou’s faith is what drove him to reach tens of thousands of the poorest people in South America’s poorest country, often their first experience receiving regular medical care before succumbing to cancer himself in October of 2002.