by Liz Bennett
Opportunity Houston Magazine, Jan/Feb 2008

Emily Untermeyer was just short of 16 when she flew to Guatemala for her first assignment with Amigos de las Americas, a Houston-headquartered organization that trains teenagers for service projects in Latin America. For three weeks she lived in a small village in a house with dirt floors and no electricity or running water. She and another volunteer shared a tiny room, slept on cots and took baths out of a bucket. Their job: giving polio, smallpox, tetanus and diphtheria shots to poor people in the area who had no access to doctors.

Today Untermeyer is Executive Director and President of the same organization, which has grown dramatically since her first volunteer assignment as a Memorial High School sophomore in 1969. It has 31 chapters in cities across the country, from New York to Seattle, and has recruited more than 20,000 high school and college-age students to serve in thousands of impoverished villages throughout Latin America.

"AMIGOS is Houston's gift to the world," says Untermeyer who describes the organization as "sort of a private Peace Corps for teenagers."

AMIGOS began as a community service project at River Oaks Baptist Church in the mid-1960s. Young people all over the city signed up as Volunteers, along with doctors and nurses from local hospitals who traveled to Latin American countries to immunize the people against polio and smallpox. An article about AMIGOS in Good Housekeeping magazine sparked national interest and spurred growth of the organization. More recently, AMIGOS programs have adapted to the changing public health needs of Latin America and branched out into many other areas of health service.

Before becoming Executive Director in 1998, Untermeyer had a diverse career in health and human services in Austin. Her jobs included social work at Brackenridge Hospital and positions as a health policy analyst and staff director for the first legislative study on AIDS.

A warm, outgoing woman, Untermeyer considers herself fortunate to have spent much of her early life south of the border. Her father ran a wholesale Mexican import company in Houston and frequently took the family on trips to Mexico, where she learned to speak Spanish early. She was also inspired by that first trip to Guatemala that she spent the next four summers on AMIGOS assignments in countries like Colombia, Nicaragua and Paraguay.

"Those were truly life-changing experienced," she says.