Plot

Unable to gain acceptance into an American medical school, aspiring physician Jeff Marx studies abroad in a small Latin American medical program run by the country's dictator.

Jeff Marx wants to study medicine and become a physician. However, his grades are far from enough to get him into an American medical school. But instead he gets a chance to study medicine abroad, in a small Latin American dictatorship, governed by Ramon Madera, who falls in love with Jeff's girlfriend, also a medical student.—Mattias Thuresson

Jeff and his fellow students struggle with general culture shock, trying to understand lectures in Spanish, an unsettling daily pledge of allegiance, and energy swings as they take amphetamines before exams. One day President Madera sends the students, despite their lack of credentials, on a mercy trip to an outlying village to examine and treat peasants who have previously only experienced a medicine man, however they are not allowed to bring along medicines. In the village, Jeff and his friends encounter a jail full of prisoners who suffer from STD's, then Jeff and a friend must ride a burro to unsucessfully minister to a dying man, whose enraged son promptly shoots Jeff in the foot. Back at school, Jeff, wearing crutches, wants to drop out of school and return to the U.S., but is talked into staying by a female American student, who develops a relationship with him. Jeff in a pinch, successfully delivers a local woman's baby. In one funny scene, a group of students remove a very stiff cadaver (for dissecting) from a morgue, and nervously try to walk it back to campus at night without being noticed. President Madera coincidentally decides he wants to marry Jeff's girlfriend, but, uninterested, she flees from Madera while at a fine restaurant. She steals boxes of various medicines and supplies from the school's locked cabinets, and she Jeff and the others deliver them in a taxi to the village, reopening their mercy clinic for a day. Madera is puzzled at the students' disappearance, and after he learns they have stolen the medical supplies, he orders the school closed down. Jeff's curious father arrives from the U.S. just as his son and Madera are having an armed standoff, then the father develops an illness which Jeff treats. The film ends happily with the school remaining open and the American students staying.