At Baja Clinic, There Is Hope for the Children : Los Angeles Couple Offer Helping Hands Across the Border

TIJUANA —  Victor Jones eased his big blue Cadillac onto Avenida Revolucion. From the back seat, 19-year-old Patricia Siqueiros called out an address listed in a guidebook most visitors to Tijuana would probably rather not read.

Around them, in a haze of diesel exhaust and carnitas smoke, 7- or 8-year-old hucksters harangued turistas with bargains on plaster piggy banks and waved them into auto upholstery shops. Overhead, Norte Americanos sat on restaurant balconies, chugging margaritas and yelping supposed Mexican war cries over the ranchero music that screeched from battered sound trucks.

They Ignore the Chaos

Neither Jones nor Siqueiros paid much attention to the pandemonium.

“Turn here,” Siqueiros said.

Shuddering over potholes and dodging mangy dogs, the dust-covered Caddy climbed into the Tijuana hills, eventually arriving in front of a gateway.

“Senor Victor! Senor Victor!” a young girl shouted, rushing forward to open the barred door.

Inside, the girl’s sister toddled haltingly across a narrow sand and concrete courtyard into Siqueiros’ arms.

Arcelia Orozco-Garcia, 2 years old this month, was born with a congenital hip defect and a clubfoot. In May, Jones arranged for her and her mother to travel to Los Angeles, where doctors repaired the deformities at no charge.

Now Arcelia is an entry in a loose-leaf guidebook of sorts that Jones recently created on his home computer to help him keep track of more than 160 Baja California children with serious medical problems. These are the children who are being helped or awaiting help in the United States through Clinica de Esperanza Infantil (Children’s Hope Clinic), which Jones and his wife, Maxine, created in Rosarito Beach, about 15 miles south of Tijuana.

It Started in Ensenada

The Good Samaritanism got started 2 1/2 years ago, when Jones first met Siqueiros, who was born in Ensenada with her right arm missing below the elbow.

A man whose face shows the damage of too much sunshine, Jones had fallen in love with Baja California’s beaches and bargains on his first visit. Before long, he and his wife built a home overlooking the ocean at El Bufadora, about 80 miles south of the border.

Virtually every weekend for 20 years, Jones made a weekly pilgrimage to his personal paradise, then returned to his real life in Burbank, where he owned a stock brokerage and a metal fabrication business.

On each trip, Jones recalled, he was saddened by the overwhelming poverty and the gamut of human misery he drove past, but like so many of his compatriots, he counted his blessings and figured, “What could I do?”

Eight years ago, the Joneses bought a new home at San Antonio del Mar, a modern enclave of North Americans overlooking the ocean near Rosarito Beach. The Joneses hired a local woman to clean their home, and gradually their lives became intertwined with her’s.

When the woman’s husband died, the Joneses, who never had the children they hoped for, unofficially adopted the woman’s six daughters.

To give the girls a foothold in Rosarito Beach’s tenuous economy, Jones opened a clothing store. He named it Seis Hermanas (Six Sisters) and gave the older of the girls jobs there.

As other sisters grew older and needed jobs, Jones opened a modest shoe store, a bridal shop and another, trendier, Seis Hermanas boutique in the mall adjacent the famous Rosarito Beach Hotel. The store’s modest profits go back to the sisters and a steadily growing number of other local girls, he said.

Soon after Jones retired and moved to his Mexican home on a more permanent basis, Patricia Siqueiros walked into the Seis Hermanas boutique.

Mechanical Arm

With the help of family and friends, Siqueiros had acquired an inexpensive mechanical arm. But that arm had broken and Siqueiros, who lived without running water and indoor plumbing in an impoverished section of Rosarito Beach, couldn’t afford to replace it.

“I looked at that useless piece of machinery hanging at her side, and thought, ‘This is criminal,’ “Jones recalled. “She needed help and I decided to find out how and where she could get it.”

Maxine Jones had been a registered nurse at St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank for more than 30 years. Victor Jones had completed six years of medical school before dropping out for financial reasons, he said.

As he began making the rounds of Southern California medical facilities, piecing together a picture of the services available, Jones found that Shriners Hospitals for Crippled Children in Los Angeles will help any child with certain medical problems regardless of their finances.

The hospital agreed to admit Siqueiros, and with funding from Shriners and UCLA’s Children’s Amputee and Prosthesis Program, agreed to supply Siqueiros with a prosthetic arm.

Jones took a letter from the doctors at Shiners to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, got Siqueiros a permit to cross the border, and brought her to the U.S.

Now Siqueiros wears a flesh-toned prosthesis with an electric hand, and controls it with the grace of a concert pianist through surface electrodes connected to the muscles in her own arm. “Kids here call me the Bionic Woman,” she said.

Word soon spread throughout Rosarito Beach. “Mothers began coming up to me and asking, ‘Are you the one who helps the kids?’ ” said Jones, who speaks good, if not fluent, Spanish.

One of those mothers brought Jones her 7-year-old boy who was born with his arms joined to his sides. Jones returned to Los Angeles and arranged with Shriners to get the boy the surgery he needed.

Parents began arriving at the Joneses’ home or shops at all hours, and he gained expertise in navigating the erratically charted waters of international Good Samaritanism, finding other hospitals and programs to handle the children’s various problems.

Some Doctors Volunteer

Finally the Joneses decided to create a clinic. Now, anxious mothers and fathers from Rosarito, Tijuana, and even the interior of Mexico bring their children to the monthly Clinica de Esperanza, which is located beside a large courtyard, in several bare rooms donated by Rosarito Beach’s quasi-governmental agency called an Ejido .

Sometimes local doctors volunteer their time at the clinic, sometimes doctors and non-medical volunteers come down from “the other side,” and sometimes Siqueiros and the Joneses do the work themselves--Maxine Jones giving checkups, Siqueiros interpreting and consoling, and Victor Jones handling the paper work, from applications for hospitals to INS forms.

“Everything we do (in the U.S.) is done with private funds,” Jones said, explaining that foreigners are not entitled to free medical services that might go to U.S. citizens. “Everything we do is done through charity or in a teaching program where (the hospital) is using these kids as teaching cases.”

When an appropriate institution is located for a particular child’s problem, Jones himself arranges to get the child--and in some cases the mother--to the U.S. and back.

A Network of Supporters

Jones often brings the children to Los Angeles in his own car, but an informal network of supporters has also sprung up: The Ejido often donates the use of its vans; mothers of children who have been helped by the clinic sell donated clothes to offset the cost of gas and food; a Tijuana man has indexed 30,000 pairs of eyeglasses which the clinic distributes, collected by Lions’ Clubs and airlines; and the father of Arcelia, whose clubfoot was repaired, sometimes brings milk and cheese from the Tijuana dairy at which he works, Jones said.

The clinic also receives some support from the Lions Club of Rosarito and the Shriners Club of Tijuana, and it coordinates its services with medical clinics in Ensenada and Calexico, Jones said.

“I’ve always been a businessman, and I’m not afraid to ask for something--especially when it’s for the children,” he added, pointing to the infant formula, sutures, plastic bed pans and bandages lining the clinic’s plywood supply closet. “ Kids is the magic word. Say kids and people open up. . . . There are a lot of generous people out there.”

Still, a lot of the money for the clinic comes from his own pocket, Jones admitted one Sunday morning, as he stood outside Seis Hermanas watching people prepare the small facing plaza for a fiesta. With children bounding up to say “buenos dias “ and men and women smiling and stopping to chat, Jones noted that his generosity is not entirely selfless.

“As many years as I’ve lived in Burbank, I can still go from one end of town to the other and possibly not see anyone I know,” Jones said. “But I rarely go through this little town without five people waving.” And 37 local children now call him padrino , or godfather, he said.

A Memorable Sign

“There’s a sign over a clinic in Ensenada that says, ‘No man stands so tall as when he stoops to help a child.’ It’s the truth. When a child you’ve helped gives you a kiss, you feel 10 feet tall.”

Like so many North Americans, the Joneses have taken advantage of Mexico’s low cost of living to create a life for themselves that they couldn’t afford in the U.S. They know where to go for the best margaritas and lobster and mariachi music.

But, as Patricia Siqueiros pointed out, they’ve also made the lives of others better.

Siqueiros is a case in point. She works part-time at Seis Hermanas, and with her new arm and sewing machine, she makes clothes and hopes someday to become a fashion designer.

But she spends at least as much of her time helping other children. With the visa Jones obtained for her, she drives patients across the border to various hospitals and clinics as often as several times a week, and she knows Southern California’s freeways as well as she knows Tijuana’s twisting streets. After so many months in U.S. hospitals herself, she speaks English with casual assurance.

Recently, a 13-year-old named Jose got his arm caught in a mixing machine at the Rosarito restaurant where he works. The next day, Siqueiros accompanied him in a Red Cross ambulance across the border. Doctors saved the boy’s life, but only by amputating his arm.

“The doctors said they’ve never met anyone with such a positive attitude,” Jones said. “I told them to credit it to the help he got from Patty.”

“I just told him to be strong,” Siqueiros explained.

But Siqueiros clearly has more than words to offer the children and adolescents she transports over the border.

After visiting Arcelia, the girl whose clubfoot was repaired, Jones and Siqueiros drove to another area of Tijuana to check up on Dora Soria, a 7-year-old born without forearms, who is scheduled to be fitted for prosthetic arms later this year.

Patient Counselor

A shy girl with trusting brown eyes, Dora immediately led Siqueiros into a concrete patio shared by two small houses, where they sat in the dusk, chattering and giggling like sisters.

Later, Dora sat on Siqueiros’ lap, the sleeves of her bright red sweater hanging at her sides.

“Would you like to have hands like mine?” Siqueiros asked, opening and closing her electronic right hand so gently she might have been grasping a rose bud.

Dora watched with obvious admiration. New hands would mean she could do lots of things, she whispered. She could cook and turn the dial on the television. She would also be able to write, and so, perhaps, go to school for the first time.

When Jones and Siqueiros said adios, Dora hugged them both tightly.

Haves and Have Nots

Jones’ Cadillac dropped down the steep Tijuana hills toward the lights of the city, along the winding road to Rosarito as he talked about the clinic and the paradoxes of living in an area that can be a paradise for outsiders and the opposite for many born there.

Speaking diplomatically, for fear of having doors that are only slightly ajar slam shut, he said: “Down here, I’ve found that there is really only the very poor and the very rich. The middle class is very small.”

As for charity, “The rich won’t and the poor can’t. So most help really comes from the other side”--from individuals and medical aid groups like the Flying Samaritans.

Jones’ present goal is to open the clinic more frequently, he said. He’d like to have doctors present more often and to hold health and nutrition and sex education classes.

The clinic has put a down payment on an X-ray machine, but can’t use it until it’s paid for. Doctors in the U.S. have agreed to conduct eye exams at the clinic, but can’t do so without a special lamp and other equipment which the clinic can’t afford.

But what really worries Jones is that the clinic, which grew out of one person’s efforts to help others, remains so vitally linked to that one person.

“I’d like to get the clinic to the point where it’s self-sufficient, where, if something happened to me, it wouldn’t be the end of the clinic,” he said.

As it is, would the clinic fold without him?

“I’m afraid so,” Jones said.

But a soft voice chimed in from the back seat. “Maybe,” Siqueiros said. “And maybe not.”

For more information about Clinica de Esperanza Infantil, call (818) 843-5155 or write P.O. Box 4008, Burbank, CA 91503.