Nuturing the Native Species of Peru

We are excited to share Cam Stewart’s experience below, funded by Dr. Thomas Mack.

My trip to Peru was a once in a lifetime experience. I was given the rare opportunity to fly to Peru where I spent 4 weeks in the Amazon rainforest among the native species. There were so many unique, amazing experiences that choosing just three seemed unfair.

While in the Amazon I was given the rare opportunity to work with a baby manatee. His care entailed anything from hand fed bottle feeds to bi-weekly cleanings of the pool. But this experience did not come without hardship. There were several sleepless nights where I would spend the whole night up watching him colic (experience extreme unrelenting abdominal pain). These nights connected so many different areas of Veterinary Medicine taught at The Ohio State University. After grueling overnight shifts we would often drive into the city the next day to do free veterinary care for community stray/owned dogs and cats. This broadened my global health mindset along with emerging me in a completely different cultural ideology of what owning a dog is. The final experience was the diversity found in Peru.

This experience was shared internationally with many different countries where veterinary students from Sweden, Ecuador, France, and many others would all break bread at the same dinner table day in and day out. The languages spoken and taught, the cultural differences share and the traditions practiced along made this a priceless once in a lifetime experience. I want to thank everyone who assisted in my scholarship that without I would have never been able to travel and experience this.