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 Health & Beauty | December 2007 
Tijuana's Poor Get Rare Care Courtesy of Canadian Expat
 Sheldon Alberts - CanWest News Service
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| | Dr. Betty Jones of San Diego, Calif. at Hospital Infantil De Las Californias in Tijuana, Mexico. (J. Kat Woronowicz/CanWest News Service) |
Tijuana, Mexico - It's the mid-morning rush at Hospital Infantil de las Californias, and the waiting area is packed with young mothers cradling newborn babies, all wrapped in heavy blankets to protect against the December chill. A handful of apple-cheeked toddlers mill about the brightly painted play area along the back wall of the room; others cling tightly to their parents' sides, faces taut with expressions of wary uncertainty.
This is what success looks like to Dr. Elizabeth 'Betty' Jones.
Only 15 years ago, the place these young Mexican families now come to for ambulatory care was a barren piece of gravelly, government-owned land, tucked away in the boonies of industrial Tijuana, just a few hundred metres south of the U.S.-Mexico border crossing at Otay, Calif.
Now the site is home to a 22,000-square-foot pediatric day hospital, the only one in Baja California, which provides free or subsidized care to indigent Mexican children.
As Jones enters the hospital's front door, she is greeted with a warm hug by one of the hospital volunteers. Newcomers on the 250-person staff may only know her as head of the nutrition department, the always-upbeat woman who teaches young mothers about the health benefits of breastfeeding.
But the hospital's longtime doctors and nurses know the bigger story: that Jones is also the hospital's founding chairwoman, an expatriate Canadian without whom the hospital might not exist.
"We started from nothing - no money, no backing. It was just a crazy idea that we thought would work," Jones says. "We didn't realize how difficult it would be."
The unlikely tale of how Jones came to build a hospital for the poor in Mexico begins with a love story in 1955. Then a 21-year-old Calgarian, Jones came to San Diego for a vacation after graduating with a degree in nutrition and dietetics from the University of Alberta.
It was on a southern California beach during a hunt for grunions, the silvery-scaled fish that in summer come ashore to spawn, that she met a young veterinarian, Robert Jones. After a whirlwind romance, Betty Jones abandoned plans to settle in Alberta and moved to San Diego.
"I came down to find out if it was for real and decided, yes, it was for real," she says.
Jones received post-graduate degrees from San Diego State University and the University of San Diego before going to work at area hospitals. In 1976 that she was approached by a Catholic sister to volunteer at a tiny pediatric clinic just 30 kilometres south in Tijuana. A group called Project Concern was desperate for the help of a nutritionist to educate doctors and patients alike.
"Once I got bitten by Mexico, it was infectious. It's the feeling that, in many ways, you can actually make a difference," she says.
At the first Project Concern clinic, Jones helped introduced "kangaroo care" - a technique in which tiny infants are wrapped tight against the skin of their mothers. In the absence of the mother, Jones taught nurses and doctors to act as surrogates, carrying the swaddled infants throughout the hospital during rounds.
That intimate skin-to-skin contact, Jones learned, helps underweight or unhealthy babies thrive.
"They are warm. You can feel the baby's heartbeat. It's almost like they are back in utero."
Jones volunteered two days a week at the Project Concern clinic until the Mexican economic crisis in the 1980s, when the clinic's operators donated the facility to the state government. It was converted into a general hospital.
Suddenly, Tijuana's children had nowhere to go but the city's general hospital - a downtrodden facility with sheetless bed and desperate nursing shortages that sometimes forced parents to provide care themselves.
"We just thought this was terrible. The kids weren't getting anything," Jones says.
With a Mexican partner, Dr. Gabriel Chong King, Jones draft a proposal for a pediatric hospital and was thrust into the cutthroat world of fundraising, where she had to "beg, borrow and steal" for donations. The state government in Baja California donated the land and, by 1994, Jones scraped together $50,000 US to open a tiny 2,000-square-foot day clinic. But Jones had bigger plans, an expanded facility that could provide everything from dental care to ophthalmology services to orthopedic surgery. So she began knocking on the doors of wealthy Californians, often driving executives to Mexico in her own car to see the hospital first hand.
"For myself, I don't think I could ask for a nickel. But for kids, I can be pretty brazen," she says. "We thought this would be easy. But it's been lots of blood, sweat and tears."
Jones eventually secured major donations from John Moores, the owner of the San Diego Padres, and corporations like Mattel and Toshiba, which operate factories in Tijuana.
The second phase of the hospital, a $2.4-million US facility with 20,000 square feet of space, opened in 2001. Jones cultivated a strong Canadian connection to Hospital Infantil de Las Californias from the start. The hospital is the only "trinational" medical facility in Mexico, with foundations in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico providing support. The Canadian contributions to the hospital are evident even in the smallest details.
Jones recruited a Calgary architect to help design the hospital and received a $50,000 Cdn grant from McGill University to make it environmentally friendly.
In 2005, her former University of Alberta classmates established an endowment for the hospital to mark the 50th anniversary of their graduation. The waiting room's 'play wall' is inspired by one at Alberta Children's Hospital in Calgary, and the hospital uses a medical records system created by a Calgary communications student. Each year, Jones brings Canadian college students - mostly from the University of Calgary, the University of Alberta and Calgary's Mount Royal College - to Tijuana to volunteer in the hospital.
Colin Robertson, Canada's former consul general in Los Angeles, remembers hosting a lobster dinner at his home and charging guests $25 a head, with proceeds going to the new hospital.
"It struck me that this was exactly the sort of 'new diplomacy' project that we should be supporting," Robertson says. "Here was this wonderful lady, well into her retirement, who was determined to still make a difference when she could have been enjoying herself at a villa or looking after grandchildren ... She has passion, conviction and determination. So who could say no?"
Since the hospital opened, more than 230,000 patients have been treated and 4,000 surgeries performed. But it continues to struggle to pay the bills. Only 25 per cent of the hospital's staff is paid - Jones is not one of them.
About 10 per cent of patients, the poorest of the poor, pay nothing for care. Others pay on a sliding scale, with the maximum charge still just half the cost of services at other Tijuana hospitals.
"There are pockets of poverty in this city as bad as anywhere in the world," Jones says, citing the $4.50 US a day minimum wage.
Like Canadians, Mexicans have a complicated relationship with their American neighbours that sometimes inhibits outreach and co-operation.
"I think the fact that I'm Canadian has opened a lot of doors," Jones says. "The most important thing we are doing is building relationships."
Jones declines - politely but firmly - to give her exact age. But the hospital's needs, she says, are such that she has no plans to stop working.
About 80 per cent of the hospital's $1.8-million annual operating costs are raised in Mexico, but the bulk of money for new capital projects - including plans for an $8-million US surgical centre Ñ comes from American and Canadian donors. Jones still sees patients once a week, and when a visitor asks about patients the hospital has helped, she produces a wallet-sized photo album.
Here's a picture of Jaime Alto, a five-year-old boy who had surgery to fix a cleft palate. There's Angel Cuanto, a seven-year-old whose throat tumour shrunk after medication and surgery, allowing him to breathe.
And then there's 28-year-old Alejandro Guevara, who emerges from a meeting room at the hospital as Jones conducts a tour. At 15, he was paralyzed from scoliosis. After several surgeries on his legs, Guevara regained the ability to walk. He graduated high school, has a job in Tijuana and now volunteers as a fundraiser for the hospital.
When Guevara sees Jones, he breaks into a broad grin and grips her in a bear hug.
"Maybe I don't have so much money to give," he says, "but I give my time and anything other thing I can do for the hospital." Soon Jones, too, is beaming.
"Isn't that a great story?" she says. |
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