The Amigo Americans

The sleazy, wide-open border town of Tijuana attracts hundreds of pleasure-bent college students each spring. One band of California youngsters, 300 strong, had more to show for their Mexican trip this year than hangovers or tourist trinkets. They spent Easter vacations in Tijuana's forlorn slum district, building an X-ray clinic, a food and drug warehouse, a free-milk bar for youngsters and a 16-crib hospital for infants.

Whirlwind Worker. The new buildings are part of a burgeoning welfare complex known as the Juarez-Lincoln Social Center -- and of an ambitious private program called Project Amigos. Both were started three years ago, when Mrs. Mabel Naylor Danalis, a San Diego Welfare Department employee who had previously worked among the poor in Greece and Chiang Kai-shek's China, heard of ten wartime dormitory buildings that were about to be torn down outside of San Diego.

In two whirlwind weeks, Mrs. Danalis talked the U.S. Government into giving her the dormitories, cajoled a site for them from Tijuana city fathers, raised $5,000 to move the buildings across the border and began recruiting college students willing to fit them out on their spring vacations. The first group, in 1962, turned four of the buildings into a clinic and classrooms. Next year the Amigos converted the other six; in 1964 they built six small clinics from scratch in outlying sections of Tijuana.

Something Added. Mixing concrete for foundations, driving nails, painting, digging sewage trenches, boys and girls work side by side--and scrupulously respect the project's list of dos ("girls are always escorted") and don'ts ("no excessive displays of affection") designed to ensure that they do not "contribute to the portrait of the 'Ugly American.'" The students pay their own expenses, prepare their own meals, even kick in a minimum of $10 each to help buy precious building materials.

Most go home grateful for the experience. "Something has been added to my life," says Jim Bigelow, a 20-year-old junior at the University of the Pacific. "Something you cannot know until you've worked on a project of this type. This is not education. This is life." Though the Center operates on a shoestring budget of $225 a month raised by California churches and individual donations, its main clinic serves 200 patients a week; other facilities include courses in English, sewing, nutrition, sanitation and business, and a school that graduates 15 sorely needed nurse's aides every three months. Dr. Roberto Escalante, head of the new children's hospital, has only one regret. "I only wish," he told this year's volunteers, "that you could be here to see the mothers' faces when they bring their sick children here." Chances are they will--next year.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.