Alabama Homeboys; Stan Brock

We’re talking with some of those today. Former gang members from LA now working with impoverished young men in Alabama.

A former cowboy from the Amazon who now brings health care to the armies of struggling Americans who have none.

This hour, On Point: extraordinary people tackling extraordinary problems.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.Guests:

Joining us from Los Angeles is Agustin Lizama, a "senior navigator" and mentor at Homeboy Industries.  He was a gangster for 13 years and incarcerated several times before joining Homeboy Industries in 2005. He has been working with children and teenagers in Prichard, Alabama since 2007.
See "Alabama Homeboys," a multimedia report at LATimes.com about  Homeboy Industries' work in Prichard.

From Mobile, Alabama, we're joined by John Eads, executive director and co-founder of the Light of the Village Christian Ministry in Prichard, Alabama. He has been working with kids in Prichard for eight years.

Also from Mobile is Dacino Dees, 17, a resident of the Alabama Village section of Prichard. He was headed for a gangster lifestyle before meeting Agustin Lizama and John Eads.

And we're joined by Ronald Davis, mayor of Prichard, Alabama since 2004.

Later this hour, we talk with Stanley Brock, founder of Remote Area Medical, about his mission to provide free healthcare to those who need it.

Guest:

Stanley Brock joins us from Knoxville, Tennessee. He was born in 1936 in the UK, where he grew up. He spent 15 years of his early adulthood in the Amazon Basin, and became co-host of the NBC-TV program "Wild Kingdom" in the 1960s. On a trek through the U.S. designing zoos, he landed in Knoxville, where in 1985 he founded Remote Area Medical, originally to bring medical care to the remote Amazon. It now provides free medical care to thousands every year around the world, and increasingly in the United States.