Nick Frame poses with some of his new monkey friends during a recent trip to Peru. Frame, a junior at Grand Valley State University, traveled to the South American country at the beginning of the month to participate in medical work with Amazon Promise, a nonprofit organization.

Nick Frame, a Shelby Township native and junior at Grand Valley State University, spent his spring break canoeing the Amazon River and visiting impoverished villages in the South American country of Peru on a medical expedition.

From Feb. 29 to March 8, Frame traveled to Peru with Amazon Promises, a nonprofit organization started by Royal Oak native Patty Webster that seeks to offer medical treatment and clinical help to remote villages in the Amazon Basin of Northeastern Peru, where Webster has lived for the past 18 years. Stationed in the city of Iquitos, Frame and his group traveled to several villages to provide medical assistance and help.

“Iquitos is really a unique city. It’s this city in the Amazon where the only way to get there is by plane or boat; there are no roads leading to it, although there are roads all over the city, which is kind of odd,” Frame said. “The only way to get around is on these 3-wheeled motorcycles that have kind of a bench in back for you to sit on.”

The volunteers began their trip with a tour of some of Peru’s most devastated areas, including the village of Belen, which spends much of the year under water due to the flooding of the Amazon.

“It’s high-water season for the Amazon right now and literally half the city is completely under water,” Frame said. “You have to take a canoe to get around and the houses are basically like shacks raised high above the water, or they’re designed to flood when the river overflows.”

During that time, Frame said the group toured areas of the rainforest, and was able to view the diverse selection of plant and animal life that thrives in the environment.

“It was amazing,” he said. “It was completely something you’ve never seen before. The plants and bugs and animals down there are just completely different than anywhere else in the world. We saw these lily pads that were literally about four feet wide. It was really surreal, just to see something you’d normally see on the Discovery Channel, but close enough to reach out and touch it.”

Frame said, however, that the area was not necessarily a tropical paradise and nearly all of the patients they treated were suffering from maladies that stemmed from the pollution in the Amazon.

“There are piles of trash just littering the water that you have to go through. And the kids go swimming in that water. They bathe in it, they wash their clothes in it, they get their drinking water from it. Almost all of the people we saw had parasites from that,” he said. “We saw a lot of people who had rashes and a lot of people who had parasites. Because it’s so flooded and they don’t have any sewage, they acquire these little wormlike parasites. I think nearly everyone we treated had them.”

Clinics were set up in Belen and other areas. The groups were made up of doctors, students and others with medical experience, giving a diverse array of talents to each group.

“We would take all of our supplies in and set up clinics,” said Frame. “And (Webster) would show everyone how to do everything she does, like how to diagnose, how to take histories, how to talk with the patients. She was just an unbelievable help.”

The group of strangers from throughout the United States had to quickly acclimate to the environment and to each other in order to properly work as a team.

“We had four clinics on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. It went really excellent,” Frame said. “We all worked together really well, and we all knew what to do and what was expected of us.”

Frame, who is currently applying to medical schools, hopes to eventually return to Peru on another expedition; once he enrolls in a medical school, he will be able to travel with Amazon Promise for two weeks, which he believes would give him an even greater education.

“I don’t feel like in the U.S. that I would be able to do a lot of what I did,” he said. “Because they don’t have a lot of doctors (in Peru), I was able to do a lot more in terms of diagnosis and treatment without any of the red tape. Here we wouldn’t be able to do that.”

For more information on Amazon Promise and its various expeditions, visit http://amazonpromise.com