Friendly Persuasion

The swarthy Mexican Indian sat dolefully on one of the clinic's bright, white beds and wrinkled his nose at the strange odor of Lysol. Suddenly his eyes widened slightly. Bearing down on him, with a hypodermic in one hand and an alcohol swab in the other, was a blonde American girl. "Caramba" he muttered, "Me va a injector la hueral" The girl smiled politely, swiftly completed her job, then turned to a sobbing little Indian boy. "No tengas miedo" she promised. Then she pulled down his pants, gave him an injection in the backside and hurried on to another patient.

To pretty, 19-year-old Nancy Wills of Bristol, Pa., this sort of routine has become almost second nature. So it has to the eleven other U.S. girls of the Friends Service Unit at Cuautla, Mexico. The unit is one of two such Quaker-run projects in Mexico; the other, for boys, is at Yautepec. At its annual meeting in Philadelphia last week, the American Friends Service Committee, in response to invitations from local Mexican officials, approved plans to carry on its practice of augmenting year-round units with at least five summer groups.

Service Only. Such invitations from gringo-distrusting, Catholic Mexico are high testimony to the special approach of the Quakers. Good will, rather than relief, is the prime purpose. The committee furnishes personnel only; the units make a special point of handing out no supplies. And local Mexican authorities --not the Norteamericanos--decide what the volunteers will do and how they will do it. Their activities are bossed by Mexicans and carried out by Mexican methods, however old-fashioned they may seem by U.S. standards. As in all Friends Service Committee undertakings, religion is manifested in deed rather than word.

The Payoff. The twelve girls of the Cuautla Service Unit sign up for six to eight months, pay $35 a month for their board. They live in an unused patio of a public school under the easygoing supervision of the project's Quaker directors, Dr. & Mrs. Raymond Binford. Each morning, after a 20-minute period of Quakerly meditation, the group separates for its various duties -- helping the Mexican nurses at the clinic, accompanying them on their rounds, supervising playground activities in the school.

Though some of the girls at Cuautla admit that their chief motive for joining was the prospect of adventure, most of them have found real satisfaction in the Friends' experiment in grassroots international relations. Said 18-year-old Gay Bauman of New York last week: "So many tourists . . . have acted so badly here that it is almost automatic for the Mexicans to view you coldly. They are beginning to know that all Americans aren't bad."

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