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Amy Smith

Biography

Amy Smith, 24, and previously an undergraduate Jack Kent Cooke Scholar, spent her childhood in rural Honduras at a small hospital started by her parents to provide some medical care to impoverished and disease-prone villagers. From the age of nine, she worked in the pharmacy, filed charts, took vital signs, and comforted the patients and their families, so it is not surprising that she intends to be a public-health doctor in remote places where medical care is scarce and diseases are rampant. She earned a 3.7 GPA at Cornell University as a recipient of an undergraduate scholarship from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, majoring in nutritional sciences, and will attend the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences for a combined M.D. and master of public health degree.

Amy has seen firsthand what few children do: an impoverished community's vital need for urgent medical care, disease prevention, and health promotion. She was six when her parents moved to a Honduran village. "I grew up," she remembers, "surrounded by the realities of teenage pregnancy, high infant-mortality rates, chronic malnutrition, parasitic infections, and the conditions of poverty, illiteracy and social injustice that often generate them." She wants to equip herself to be a public-health doctor working hands-on with rural community health projects. She expects that training will teach her about "the needs, challenges and opportunities for health-care delivery in different cultural settings." And that background, she hopes, will lead eventually to work in international settings, perhaps within the United Nations.

It took a crisis close to home to jolt Amy into recognizing what goals motivated her. At age 17, she was impatient - and irritable at her older sister Amanda, who at 19 was one week shy of a first wedding anniversary. Then Amanda was killed by a drunk driver. That shattered "my safe womb of a world from where I could look out at the suffering around me," Amy says. Learning to live through the pain, doubts and fears, she said that instead of darkness, "I found meaning, I felt my beliefs and found courage to strive to live them. I began looking for what was true and real in others and was able and willing to let people see what was true and real in myself."

Ms. Smith struck out on her own, as a volunteer in poor villages, working in 1999 in Ecuador in a literacy class, with a mother's group and as a nurse's aide. Since then, her stateside volunteer work has included being the community nutritionist aide for a Hispanic group; working with cooks, children, and health promoters in a Nutritional Recuperation Center for Children; and putting on programs for the Health and Nutrition Society.

Amy also has put much time into peer counseling, including helping a friend draw back from the brink of suicide, partly by breaking through a wall that had kept her friend from talking about a tragedy two decades earlier. Amy is reluctant to claim credit for being the decisive influence. She hopes, however, that "everything I do will be fruitful - whether by succeeding and making an impact around me or failing and learning lessons from my mistakes."

When Amy Smith was six, her family left Michigan to establish a small socio-economic development project with a rural hospital in Honduras. Growing up, Amy spent many hours helping to fill out prescriptions, taking inventory in the pharmacy, bathing newborn babies, and taking patients' vital signs.

After graduating from high school in 1998, she spent a year volunteering in a village in Ecuador with no electricity or running water, six hours from the nearest hospital. "It was here that my interest in nutrition as a means of improving health care was further developed," Amy says. "I realized that fundamental knowledge about nutrition and access to adequate health care could dramatically improve the living standards for many people," she says, especially for infants and mothers.

After receiving her associate's degree from Durham (N.C.) Technical Community College, Amy is continuing her studies in the fall of 2002 at Cornell University. She intends to become a doctor specializing in nutrition. Someday, she hopes to found a non-profit health organization to work with low-income and rural mothers "to develop and implement programs to improve their children's health and their community's well being through nutrition."

While at Durham Tech, Amy has worked as a hospital translator for Hispanic families with deaf children and volunteered as an ESL instructor at a Chatham County elementary school. Before she began her studies at Durham Tech in 2000, she spent a year as a volunteer maintenance worker at the Baha'i World Center in Haifa, Israel.

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