Steve began learning about tropical ecosystems, indigenous and local people in 1974 at the age 15 when he went to the Rio Polochic River area in Alta Verpaz, Guatemala as a volunteer paramedic with the NGO Amigos de los Americas where he supported volunteer MD’s/ Dentist and provided vaccines to youth in the nearby small mountainous villages.  A few years later he visited a village of Angotere  Secoya indigenous people in Peru who live near the Colombian and Ecuadorian border with a Spanish Jesuit Missionary Luis Uriarte. That initial visit led to Steve living with the Angotere Secoya community on the Santa Maria River for 9 months in 1978 where he lived with a family and studied the diet and medicinal plant use in this community of 35 people. Shortly after that field research he met Tim Plowman at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Tim sent him to visit Dr. Schultes at Harvard on his way back College of the College of the Atlantic where w