Nurse practitioner Antje Postl (standing, left) and Brown at the Santa Rosa County Fair. Photograph: Courtesy of Stacy Brown

One early evening last summer, a mile outside of Santa Rosa, New Mexico, down an unpaved, one-lane road into the desert, Stacy Brown ’08 and two volunteers pulled up to the weekly community calf-roping competition and parked their dusty 1969 Chevrolet ambulance behind the bleachers of the outdoor dirt arena. About 30 or so people had gathered for the roping—most of them familiar faces from the town of 2,700. When Brown’s crew opened the ambulance’s rear doors and taped up a handwritten sign announcing Free Health Checks, only women queued up at first. “The wives actually had to drag their husbands over,” says Brown, who, alongside the other volunteers, administered free blood pressure, cholesterol, body mass index, and finger-prick blood sugar tests throughout the evening. “Cowboys, it turns out, don’t like needles.”

For Brown, a pre-med student and Hispanic studies major, the cowboys’ reluctance came as little surprise; according to most public health data she’d studied, women pay more attention to their medical needs than do men. But in the town of Santa Rosa, where Brown’s father, Randal Brown, is a physician, almost nobody sees a doctor unless their life is on the line.

Home to a largely Hispanic low-income community, the Pecos River Valley town was once a riot of neon signs, a wayside stop from the late 1920s to early 1970s on Route 66, one of the country’s first highways. In the town’s golden age, its Comet Drive-In, Silver Moon Café, and Sun ‘n Sand Motel were among the last comforts before the dusty 133-mile stretch westward to Albuquerque. In the early 1970s, Interstate 40 bypassed Santa Rosa’s section of Route 66, resulting in ghost service stations and truck stops. Today, historic billboards and a Route 66 Auto Museum in the center of Santa Rosa celebrate the town’s history in neon, chrome, and fins. Maintenance, law enforcement, and truck driving are among the most common occupations for men; cashier and food service jobs top the list for women.

Although Brown herself is not Hispanic, she is nearly fluent in Spanish, and she has spent weekends and summers watching her father treat emergency-room patients for complications of illnesses that could have been avoided with routine medical examinations. This past summer, she returned to Santa Rosa to start a program she hoped might “bring health screening to where people actually are—football games, fairs, businesses.”

What emerged was Vecinos Sanos/ Healthy Neighbors, a volunteer-staffed health screening service that travels to local community events to offer free, five-minute health tests, as well as information on how and where to find affordable follow-up care.

At their first-ever screening last August, at a county fair, Brown and a rotating staff of 17 medical professionals and lay-people tested about 100 individuals over three days. They diagnosed eight cases of diabetes and identified dozens of local residents at risk for heart disease. Most venues have been smaller. In the month before Brown returned to Boston College, her organization set up a health screening at Bozo’s Garage and Wrecker Service, where the boss, a well-known local character (and owner of the Route 66 Auto Museum), joined employees and neighbors in line for the tests.

For as long as Stacy Brown can remember, she has been interested in medicine and public health. Raised in Albuquerque by her mother, a forensic scientist, Brown spent weekends and summers with her father, the chief of staff at Santa Rosa’s Guadalupe County Hospital, a 12-bed, two-physician facility. Through him, she says, she came to recognize most of the large health issues—as well as many of the faces—in Santa Rosa’s small community.

The concept of Vecinos Sanos/Healthy Neighbors, she says, began with the find of a 1969 ambulance. Three years ago, Brown’s father bought the decrepit vehicle at an auction with the vague notion of eventually starting a mobile health service, but it sat in his yard unused, she says. “I really wanted to see this happen,” says Brown, “so I applied for a grant from Boston College.”

Brown received one of four $3,900 stipends designated for nonprofit summer internships by the Boston College Career Center, and in May she returned to Santa Rosa, where administrators at Guadalupe County Hospital had shown interest in her idea. Her first month was devoted to gathering information, fundraising, and learning how to start a nonprofit corporation. She spent her days on the phone or in her car traveling to meetings with health workers, business leaders, public officials, and medical and nursing personnel at the University of New Mexico and nearby Luna Community College.

Local benefactions—$5,000 from Guadalupe County Hospital, an at-cost ambulance brake check from Bozo’s Garage, and a paint job from Runner’s Paint and Body Shop—helped propel the project forward. Dr. Brown’s health clinic donated testing supplies and the assistance of the office financial planner.

“Half of my calls remained unanswered because I sounded like a college student,” says Brown, “but no one told me I couldn’t do it.” Several of her inquiries led to donations she’d never envisioned, including, from the drug company Pfizer, computer-scannable fill-in-the-bubble questionnaires that patients could answer anonymously. Pfizer also sent medical information pamphlets and plastic model hearts, the latter of which, says Brown, proved excellent “toys” for children tagging along to their parents’ tests.

“What makes this idea so great is that it’s simple, sustainable, and easy to replicate,” says Christina Campos, top administrator of Guadalupe County Hospital, whom Brown describes as her “mentor.” The two met weekly over the summer to discuss the project’s progress and untangle problems, such as cholesterol testing devices that stopped working when the temperature reached more than 80 degrees.

“Communities can pull this off for next to nothing compared to the kind of money the state spends on public health programs after the fact [of diagnosis],” says Campos. “More importantly, you don’t have to be a health professional to do the work.” Although there is always at least one medical professional on site for each screening, she says, some of the 17 volunteers who worked over the summer were high school students.

“We hope this will eventually become a model for other communities,” says Randal Brown. “[Stacy] has created something we desperately need and that no one is doing.” He adds, “The funding and resources are there. The only thing that will be hard to find is another Stacy.”

In Stacy Brown’s dorm room on Lower Campus, a calendar with photos of desert landscapes and adobe buildings hangs on the wall above her MCAT preparation book; a rusted antique Mexican chili-powder can sits next to an organic chemistry kit and a modern Spanish grammar book.

Since her freshman year, Brown has worked as a research assistant to professor Elizabeth Rhodes of the department of Romance languages and literatures, helping with her study of the evolving portrayals of saints in late 15th- to mid-17th-century Spanish texts, transcribing the antiquated language into modern Spanish.

This year, Brown has linked her cultural interests with her passion for medicine in an honors thesis on curanderas, Latina folk healers whose mixture of Spanish and indigenous folk rituals and herbal recipes are a part of Mexican tradition.

“This is one of the most exciting theses I’ve worked on in a long time,” says her advisor, Dwayne Carpenter, the chair of the Romance languages and literatures department and himself a scholar of medi-eval Spanish literature. “It’s so rare to have a combination of scientific, folkloristic, and literary components in a research project, as well as a living, breathing human side of the story. It’s not merely a great product in itself, it can be used as a launching pad for other work in medicine or literature or both.”

In fact, Brown hopes to do precisely that; she has applied for a Fulbright scholarship to collect stories of childbirth in Mexico. She also would like to spend time after graduation working as a medical volunteer in Africa or in Central or South America; when she returns, she will decide whether to apply to medical school.

In the months since Brown’s departure from Santa Rosa, Vecinos Sanos has continued to conduct health checks, screening nearly 200 more Santa Rosa residents at the town’s Silver Moon Auto Shop, the New Mexico State Highway Department, and the Truck Stop of America off the old Route 66. Now in the final stages of becoming a legal nonprofit with a projected annual operating budget of $70,000, the program is supported by grants from local businesses and overseen by a full-time nurse hired by the Santa Rosa health clinic. This winter, Vecinos Sanos has “hibernated,” says Brown, while she and the small on-site staff write and submit grant applications. But by springtime, she says, the ambulance will return to the road.

Read more by Cara Feinberg