Skip to Content

Global Navigation

Leadership Online

NEWS and Events

APU Sophomore Helps Many Globally

Posted December 2, 2008

  • You may have read about the spreading crime in some of the larger urban areas of Kenya, primarily in Nairobi. While your Nairobi hotel has excellent security, please exercise care and caution. — Nairobi travel advisory

    Lindsay Wetenkamp, 20, of Simi Valley does not let a little thing like this travel advisory stop her from her globe-trotting. As a change of pace, Wetenkamp will be on vacation as she joins the Masai tribe on safari in Kenya next month, thanks to her aunt who donated the trip, and she will be experiencing a few recreational firsts.

    "We’re going up in a hot air balloon and staying in a tree one night,” Wetenkamp said. “Basically, I’m just going along for the ride."

    The real ride in Wetenkamp’s life has been her determination to help people in remote areas of the poorest countries. Although she just completed her sophomore year at Azusa Pacific University, which sponsors some of her trips, Wetenkamp is well on her way to making her life goal come true.

    "My ultimate dream is to go to some Latin American place that is desperately in need of medical help,” Wetenkamp said. “I want to start a clinic."

    Wetenkamp said she has been traveling to Mexico since she was in middle school. Her first trip was with her church youth group. The living conditions were worse than Wetenkamp had expected.

    "We pitched our tents when we got there in the dark,” Wetenkamp said. “We stayed in a rock quarry, so you can imagine the ground was pretty hard. We had solar showers but the water is recycled and pretty nasty."

    That was Wetenkamp’s introduction to the Third World and the poverty that it spawns. In the ensuing years, she has been to Mexico dozens of times and is still traveling there once or twice a month on the weekends. Wetenkamp also traveled to Chile for six weeks last year, and Kenya this summer, but just for fun. Then, next year, along with more trips to Mexico, Wetenkamp plans to go to Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Guatemala. And she achieved all this through acquiring sponsors to help her fundraise.

    All of this traveling is part of Wetenkamp’s larger plan for her life’s work. She is majoring in applied health with a minor in Spanish. After graduation, she intends to go to graduate school to earn her license as a physician’s assistant specializing in rural and underprivileged medicine.

    Cheryl Wetenkamp, Lindsay’s mother, said her daughter has been intensely focused on her goals. “She has always been driven,” Wetenkamp’s mother said of her daughter. “I think it is her faith. She truly believes she is called to do this.

    The purpose of the trip to Chile last year was to visit the extremely remote island of Chulin. It was winter in that part of the world, and Chulin was so far from land that there were no communications with the outside world. Chulin lies on the border of Antarctica and Patagonia, Chile. She traveled with the group, Youth With A Mission, and lived there for 16 days. Youth With A Mission is an evangelical group which focuses on sending youth on short-term trips around the world to do good and to evangelize.

    Wetenkamp said the biggest medical problems for the 50 families living there were, according to her instructors, the result of intermarrying and the consequent genetic defects. The group hiked to visit the islanders in their homes to provide what medical care they could. There are no doctors or nurses living on the island and residents receive no medical aid from the government.

    "The best part was going to a home visit where these people don’t very often see people who live outside of their home,” Wetenkamp said. “They were amazed that anyone cared enough to come out to them."

    "The worst part of the trip was, I got food poisoning on a 20-hour bus ride coming out of Santiago,” Wetenkamp said. “And the frostbite was pretty bad. They would make me dunk my feet in water and I didn’t want to because it hurt. So that was hard."

    As for Wetenkamp's many forays into Mexico, she is now focused on a group of disabled children in Cuernavaca, Mexicali, which is about an eight-hour drive from Los Angeles.

    A cluster of 66 children with autism, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, hydroencephaly and other genetic disorders was identified by a government official in Mexico. That official has personally donated land for a future rehabilitation and therapy clinic.

    Wetenkamp immediately focused on the children who have been terribly neglected.

    "When we are not there, these kids never get any treatment,” Wetenkamp said. “The families are sort of ashamed of their child but they do love them deeply."

    The biggest hurdle, Wetenkamp said, is the way society there views disabled children.

    "The outside world views it as a great misfortune to have a child with a disability,” Wetenkamp said. “The government views them as completely useless."

    After visiting her mother’s special education classe s a few times, Wetenkamp was disturbed by the stark differences between those classes and what the situation in Mexico is for such children.

    "I saw some of the amazing programs we have here, and then there was nothing in Mexico,” Wetenkamp said.  "I saw the clear injustice in it."

    And so, Wetenkamp decided to dedicate her life to traveling to such impoverished areas and helping those in dire need.