‘Angels Without Wings’ Fly to Aid the Sick in Baja

A procession of small airplanes appears from the north, alighting one by one on a desolate airstrip in a dusty field in Baja California. Out step two dozen Americans, carrying leather bags and medical supplies. They pause to get their bearings, then move away from the field.

This is no pleasure outing. It’s another monthly visit from the Flying Samaritans, who bring medical services to the needy in some remote areas south of the border.

“When all of a sudden, everybody congregates out there in the same place, ready to go--that’s a good feeling,” said Sam Hernandez, an estimator for a Pasadena general contractor who serves as a coordinator for the group. “It’s like a flight of angels.”

That’s what a lot of Baja residents say, too. Los angeles sin alas (the angels without wings), as some Bajenos call the American volunteers, have been making their monthly flights for 26 years, and they have made a difference in some of the Mexican state’s fishing villages and agricultural outposts.

There are nine chapters of Flying Samaritans, involving about 1,500 volunteers from California, Arizona and Mexico. They run 25 fly-in clinics in remote areas of Baja. The largest chapter is the Foothill chapter, with a membership of about 400 medical and non-medical volunteers from the Los Angeles area--many of them from the San Gabriel Valley.

“I think a lot of us have passed from the ‘Me Generation’ to an ‘us-as-the-world’ idea,” says Leslie Spring, president of the chapter.

The volunteers clean teeth, examine eyes, manipulate vertebrae, remove foot calluses, give vaccinations and perform many other medical procedures in the little outposts, chipping in their own money to get there.

“The people who come to see us can’t afford to get medical services elsewhere,” says Dr. Charles Tannenbaum, an Arcadia ophthalmologist, who has been flying his own Beech Bonanza to Baja on mercy missions for the past six years. “In fact, in two out of the three locations I go, there are no medical services at all.”

Some patients are even transported, free of charge, back to the United States for surgical procedures in charitable hospitals. For example, Tannenbaum has gotten the backing of Santa Teresita Hospital in Duarte, which often contributes bed space for needy Bajenos who need surgery to remove cataracts or to correct other problems. The doctor has performed more than a dozen operations there on patients from Baja in the past three years.

Santa Teresita seemed a likely place to ask for help, says Tannenbaum, who has been a member of its medical staff for 20 years.

“The hospital has a history and reputation for personalized service,” he said, “and their background is in Mexico.” The hospital was founded 57 years ago by members of the Carmelite order, Catholic nuns who had escaped religious persecution in Mexico.

For medical professionals accustomed to having the most modern equipment in their San Gabriel Valley offices, conditions in Baja communities are sometimes less than basic. “It’s a Third World country, of course, and they lack a lot of the niceties,” says Tannenbaum--including, in many cases, running water and electricity.

“We have to bring bottled water to wash our hands and our instruments,” says Spring, who serves as coordinator of a clinic in San Telmo, a tiny settlement about 100 miles south of Ensenada. “We have a small generator for power.”

Unpredictable Problems

Dr. Larry Biederman, a Covina podiatrist, tells of the unpredictable difficulties involved in treating a young lame woman with a damaged tendon in one foot. Minor bone surgery to rebuild the woman’s arch was performed last January in a gulf community called Bahia de los Angeles.

“We had to use a dental X-ray machine to get a picture of the foot, with the patient standing on a dental chair,” he said. “Then one of the women had to go down the street, knocking on doors, to borrow some pans to develop the X-rays.”

Biederman decided to operate right there in the clinic on the woman, who had been walking on the side of her foot since she was a small child. “We scrubbed the walls and the ceiling with antiseptics and finished the job with ammonia,” he said. “We got everything set up and waited for the electricity to go on.”

Hernandez, the coordinator for the Bahia de los Angeles clinic, discovered that the town generator had run out of fuel. He purchased some diesel fuel from a local hotel, and the electricity was turned on.

“We got into surgery, and everything was going pretty smoothly until all of a sudden the lights went off again,” Biederman recalled. The podiatrist, using an electrical saw, had already begun cutting into the patient’s bone. As Biederman proceeded with manual instruments, his assistants holding flashlights in the makeshift operating room, Hernandez rushed back to the town power plant.

Lunch Break

“I ran up and (the operator) was locking the gate,” Hernandez said. “I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said he was going for lunch.” Hernandez persuaded the man to turn the generator back on until the operation was completed.

It all ended well, Biederman said. “A month after the operation, I saw her walking around with a surgical shoe, a cane and a big smile,” he said. “Two months later, she came up to me at a slow run in tennis shoes. That was great.”

Dr. Al Helfenbein, a retired Pasadena dentist who has been a “Sam” for the past 12 years, says conditions are gradually improving as new equipment is introduced by American donors.

“The first time I went down, a woman in this little village asked me to clean her teeth,” he said. “There was no dental equipment at all. The only way to do it was to lie her down on a wooden restaurant table. There she was on the table, exposed to the sun and the wind, and I was cleaning her teeth.”

Helfenbein and Dr. David Lawson, another Pasadena dentist, developed an ingenious mobile kit that enabled them to “take down everything we needed to do anything from cosmetic bonding to ordinary silver amalgam fillings,” as Lawson put it.

By now, under Lawson and Helfenbein’s leadership, the group has taken donated dental chairs and power drills to the four clinics run by the Foothill chapter. “We could take you down there and do just about anything in your mouth that we could do up in the States,” Lawson said.

Smile Restored

The rewards are memorable. Lawson treated a young woman with dark, rotten-looking front teeth, the result of a high fever when she was a child. “When she came in, she would hold her hand over her mouth when she smiled,” said Lawson. “I did some cosmetic bonding” to cover the discoloration.

Helfenbein recalled the scene when the operation was completed. “When she looked in the mirror, she just broke down and cried,” he said. “She never believed that she’d look pretty again.”

The Bajenos whom the Flying Samaritans examine are in generally good health. Their major problems are usually connected to the dearth of medical services in their communities, says Tannenbaum. “You don’t see the kind of vitamin deficiencies that would cause corneal deterioration or nerve problems,” he said. “It’s not like Africa. They’re not poor to that extent.”

Dr. Michael Budincich, a Pasadena chiropractor, treats many work-related back and neck ailments in Baja. “There’s only one category of work down there--labor,” he said. “People do a lot of repetitive lifting.”

Typically, Budincich recently treated a maid from a large tourist hotel. “She came 75 miles to see me,” he said. “Her back was hurting her from being constantly bent over, pulling sheets on the beds. I adjusted her against a wall, with a towel wrapped around my hand.”

Budincich finds the simplicity of the clinic exhilarating. “It gets me back to basics,” he said. “It’s just my hands and their backs.”

Members of the Flying Samaritans say they have diverse motives for getting involved. For some, the weekend trips are good excuses to use their piloting skills or to socialize with like-minded people.

“There’s a common thread there,” says Raymond Clark, a Security Pacific Bank vice president who serves as president of the Flying Samaritans board of directors. “The kind of activity we’re involved in automatically screens out people who don’t want to participate.”

But all seem hooked on the altruism of the organization. “It brings you back to the reality that Americans are very lucky,” says Budincich. “This is a way to give back some service to my maker, so to speak. It’s kind of like my own spiritual healing. It’s really more for me than for them.”