Henry Baker Perry III knew 50 years ago what he would be doing today. He would be doing what his grandfather and his father did. He would be a doctor.

But the third Dr. Perry did more than extend the family line of work. He gave it an adventurous turn; he became a medical missionary. Then he helped found Raleigh-based Curamericas Global, which is credited with saving the lives of thousands of poor children in foreign lands.

"It's enriched me as a person," the 59-year-old North Carolina native says. "I feel a deep connection with the impoverished people of the world."

Unlike his grandfather, a general practitioner in Watauga County, and his father, one of the first obstetrics and gynecology specialists in Greensboro, Perry decided as a student at Duke University that his life's work would be focused abroad serving the world's neediest.

Perry's hands rarely are still as he speaks during a visit to Raleigh. They move along the tabletop with the precision of the surgeon he studied to become. He laughs deeply as he remembers stories about his many years in medicine, his world travels and the people he has met since the 1969 trip to Bolivia that solidified what he would do for the rest of his life.

In medical school at Duke, Perry spent two months in the northern Bolivian Altiplano, or "high plains." He and other Duke students, working with a missionary Methodist hospital, vaccinated 10,000 children in remote villages against measles.

"It was a real eye-opener for me to be with people who had access to neither schools nor medical care," Perry says. "It changed my life."

Perry studied for the next 12 years. He transferred to Johns Hopkins University and earned a master's in public health, a doctorate in sociology and anthropology and a doctorate in medicine.

In 1981, he and his then wife, Alice Weldon, and their two sons returned to Bolivia, where the Duke-sponsored project continued to serve the poor at the Methodist hospital and a 10-bed clinic in the countryside. Within three years, the university had handed the organization, then known as Andean Rural Health Care, over to Perry.

Early obstacles

The first few years of the program were tough, Perry says. There were language barriers, and the local people, mostly Aymara Indians, were suspicious of the organization.

Until the early 1950s, Perry says, it was illegal to teach the Aymaras how to read and write. That discrimination brought about an initial distrust of the health-care program. Within a year, however, many of the locals became more receptive.

But the obstacles continued. Political and economic instability in Bolivia jeopardized the project. Anti-American sentiment was strong, Perry says, and his family became a target.

An attack fueled by local politicians, which included allegations that Perry was a CIA agent or a doctor there to sterilize local women, led to threats on the lives of Perry and his family and forced them out of Bolivia in 1984.

Perry practiced surgery in the mountains of North Carolina for the next decade. But he spent about half his time raising money for the Andean program, establishing an organizational structure and providing support through frequent trips to Bolivia, where politicians assured there would be no more problems.

As Andean Rural Health Care moved beyond the Andes, it changed its name to Curamericas in 2001 and to Curamericas Global last fall.

The organization's annual budget is about $1.2 million, and it is funded mostly through donations and grants from individuals, churches and small foundations.

The federal government's child survival program also provides funding.

Curamericas will celebrate its 25th anniversary of working in preventive health care for young children and mothers next spring. Perry and Weldon are credited with founding the organization.

Andean Rural Health Care's goal was to reach every remote household in the region with regular in-home checkups. As Curamericas, it takes that same intensive approach. Its work has helped cut death rates among children under 5 in the regions it works in Bolivia by 62 percent, according to one independent study.

The organization has since expanded to remote areas of Guatemala, where the home-visitation approach is coupled with groups of citizens who go out and teach preventive health. Curamericas hopes to have similar results there, says Executive Director Teresa Wolf.

A passion to do more

Perry's fists lightly strike the tabletop as he speaks of all that still needs to be done to reduce preventable deaths worldwide. Ten million children die each year from readily preventable diseases such as malnutrition, diarrhea and pneumonia, and everyone -- including himself and his colleagues at Curamericas Global -- could do more, he says.

"I'm getting passionate now," says Perry, smiling and adjusting his gold-and-brown eyeglasses.

That passion has taken Perry many places.

He has lived or worked with groups in Nicaragua, India, Bangladesh and Cambodia. In Haiti, he served as director general and chief executive officer of Hospital Albert Schweitzer for about three years. It was there that he met his current wife, Mirlene, who was a nurse.

Perry and his wife live in West Virginia now, where he is an endowed professor at Future Generations, a nonprofit graduate school where the 20 students enrolled for the upcoming semester come from almost as many countries.

Perry's devotion to his work has hurt in other areas.

"I've been divorced twice," he says. "It hasn't helped. It's taken a real strain on my personal life."

Perry's youngest son, Luke, says his father has worked hard through the years to balance work and personal relationships. Perry and his two sons are planning a summer sailing trip.

"Obviously, my parents aren't together anymore, but we still have a wonderful, healthy family," says Luke Perry, 30, an architecture student in Berkeley, Calif.

Friends say Perry's experiences have made him well-rounded.

"He's a delightful conversationalist," says a long-time friend and retired Methodist minister, Avery Manchester of New York. "He has a great interest in the world in general -- not just health."

Anbrasi Edward, an assistant scientist at Johns Hopkins, says Perry's way of weaving stories and parables into conversations makes students really connect to him.

"It's exciting for them to hear him describe the realities of the field," she says. "He's got an excellent sense of humor, puts everyone at ease, and he's able to adapt and accommodate himself to the audience."

In one story, Perry, with many of his signature loud laughs thrown in, recalls how he moved down Curamericas' corporate ladder, starting as the first chairman of the board and first president, then becoming medical director and, later, program adviser.

When he planned a move to Bangladesh in the mid-1990s, his Curamericas colleagues handed him a broom, telling him he had just been named the organization's janitor.

Perry now spends 20 percent of his time as the group's international programs coordinator.

Wolf says Perry is a "walking encyclopedia of contacts" who opens doors for Curamericas.

As the organization discusses ways to expand -- it hopes to forge a partnership with a Tanzanian HIV/AIDS group -- Wolf says Perry seems to have a friend or know of a doctor in each new place.

And as Curamericas grows, Perry, a self-described workaholic, will continue his research and work in international health care.

"I have no interest at all of retiring while I'm in good health," says Perry, who will turn 60 in September.

But he adds, "I do look forward to slowing down a bit."

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