NEW ORLEANS (CNS) — Fifteen years in the Amazon rain forest and a stint on the “Wild Kingdom” television show ultimately brought Stan Brock to a different sort of adventure: providing medical, dental, vision and even veterinary care to hundreds of thousands of people and animals who need it.

The Welsh-born Brock is founder and CEO of Remote Area Medical Volunteers Corps, originally founded to bring medical treatment to the Wapishana Indians in British Guiana (now the independent nation of Guyana), among whom Brock lived as a teenager and young adult.

But the all-volunteer organization he established in 1985 now devotes the majority of its time to the uninsured and underinsured throughout America. “The need here is so great that, except for a year-round operation where I used to live, all of our focus now is in the U.S.,” he said.

Brock’s talk June 8 to participants in the Catholic Health Association’s annual assembly in New Orleans was peppered with colorful stories and jokes about his time as a “vaquero,” Portuguese for cowboy, on the largest tropical cattle ranch in the world.