Volunteers Find a Whole Different World on the Other Side of the Border

Not only are there lots of wonderful places to visit in the world, but there are also many ways to visit them. You can take a cruise or go on a tour. Or you can do something more useful--and maybe more gratifying--by joining the Flying Samaritans. This loosely knit organization, with 1,300 members and 16 chapters in California and Arizona, provides medical assistance in rural Mexico, chiefly Baja California.

Many Flying Samaritans members are women who, like Aileen Saunders Mellott, one of the group’s founders, have come to love the people and landscape of the 800-mile-long Baja peninsula.

The story of the organization’s beginnings sounds like something out of an adventure travel book. In the fall of 1961, Mellott (whose last name then was Saunders) was flying her six-seat Beech Twin Bonanza home to San Diego from Cabo San Lucas when she ran into a dust storm. An intrepid traveler and pilot who had worked with the Coast Guard Auxiliary Search and Rescue team, Mellott made a forced landing on a lonely mesa near the hamlet of El Rosario.

The Baja outback is a wild, unwelcoming place, and it looked as if she and her five passengers were in for a hard night. But a rattletrap truck appeared out of nowhere, dispatched by the doyenne of El Rosario, Don~a Anita Espinoza (who had seen the plane come down). The group was fed and sheltered that night, and extra fuel was found so they could take off the next morning.

To thank the good Samaritans who rescued her, Mellott gathered food, clothing and toys and flew them to El Rosario for Christmas, accompanied by a group of volunteers who included Dale Hoyt, a physician who lived near San Diego. He had brought his doctor’s bag, and he performed the first Flying Sams examination of a villager on Don~a Anita’s kitchen table. Seeing the unmet needs of the townspeople, Hoyt vowed to return with doctors, nurses and medical supplies, which is what the Flying Sams have been doing for nearly 40 years.

The story is moving to me, especially because my brother John and I ran into trouble in Baja and were likewise rescued. John’s four-wheel-drive got stuck on a deserted dirt road in the Parque Nacional Sierra de San Pedro Martir, and no matter what we did, we couldn’t get the vehicle out of the sand trap. After spending a long, cold night in a tent, we were rescued by two Mexican men, who hooked our vehicle to their Land Rover and pulled us out. They wouldn’t accept money for the good deed. Helping people in distress was second nature to them--something I keep in mind when I read reports about the dangers of traveling in rural Mexico.

Mellott, who now knows Baja intimately, says: “The people there are very friendly. I’ve never had any problem, contrary to what you hear.”

Maybe part of Mellott’s secret to success is that she and the Flying Samaritans travel with open, giving hearts, prompting reciprocation. Over the years, the organization’s chapters have established clinics in such remote places as the Bahia de Los Angeles on the Gulf of California and the village of El Alamo, 10 miles down a rutted road that meets Highway 3 about halfway between Ensenada on the west coast of Baja and San Felipe on the east. Longtime volunteers, who visit the clinics one weekend every month, develop close ties with the people in these areas, sometimes treating the children and grandchildren of former patients. Many Flying Sams also help ferry the seriously and chronically ill to hospitals in California for further treatment.

“I have such a love for this,” says Carol Hastings, president of the L.A. Coastal chapter. She manages work assignments, supplies and provisions at El Alamo clinic, which is held in an old adobe building with no running water, a wood-fired stove and a generator for electricity. The group, generally 10 to 15 volunteers who chip in for trip expenses, arrives by car on Saturday mornings. (The Mexican government recently closed the town’s landing strip to deter drug smuggling. The same thing is happening in other communities served by the Flying Sams, jeopardizing the group’s ability to reach some of the most remote and neediest clinics.)

The group spends all day and part of the next working. With interpreters close at hand, dentists pull teeth, doctors examine patients and nurses counsel pregnant women. Other volunteers cook, organize supplies and keep children occupied. “But it’s all very egalitarian,” says Carol Litty, president of the Orange County chapter, which runs a clinic in Jesus Maria, 40 miles north of the town of Guerrero Negro.

When the workday is over, volunteers get a chance to enjoy Baja, hiking to quartz fields, abandoned mines and ancient pictographs. Dinner is usually a barbecue, followed by good conversation and stargazing. In the summer, volunteers at El Alamo sleep under the night sky, while those from the Jesus Maria clinic camp on beaches lapped by the Pacific Ocean. When the weather turns cold, rustic accommodations are found, though volunteers at some clinics, like the one at the Bahia de Los Angeles, sleep in a motel year-round.

Flying south on a small plane is still one of the fringe benefits for Orange County chapter volunteers at Jesus Maria. By car the trip would take a day, but by plane it takes little more than an hour. “The Baja is so close, and yet so remote. It’s like going to Tierra del Fuego,” says L.A. Coastal chapter president Hastings, who gets home from a clinic weekend on a Sunday night, takes a long, hot shower, then sleeps in her own soft bed.

The contrast between life in Southern California and rural Mexico is, for her, compelling. “It grounds me,” she says. That has always seemed to me one of the best reasons for traveling.

For information on the Flying Samaritans, call (800) 775-9018, Internet https://www.geocities.com/heartland/plains/1134.