Oct 23, 2007 8:00 AM

Bruins without borders

The scene in front of the makeshift medical clinic one recent Saturday could have been lifted from the nightly news. Weary mothers cradled listless babies while flies circled their faces. Diapered toddlers with painful-looking skin disorders crouched in the dust.

Most of the families arrived on foot, several before dawn. By 11 a.m., it was 95 degrees in the shade. Yet, this wasn't Somalia or some other far-flung humanitarian crisis. And the response wasn't organized by UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders or any other well-known relief organization. This was Cerro Azul, in Tecate, Mexico, and the caregivers were Bruins.

For the past eight years, the undergraduate group, Chicanos for Community Medicine, has traveled four times a year to this valley of chronic unemployment on the outskirts of Tecate. Together with a handful of volunteer physicians, medical residents and pharmacists, the service club organizes medical screenings, evaluations and handouts of free medication for all comers.

Within a half hour of their arrival in Cerro Azul, 22 undergraduates had turned a derelict community center without electricity into a one-stop relief center, with a makeshift waiting room, examining room, pharmacy, repository for hundreds of medical records collected since the project's inception and a distribution center for food and donated clothes and toys.

It wasn't a moment too soon for the 185 villagers treated that day. The doctors prescribed and gave prenatal vitamins to a mother of three who was six weeks pregnant, medication to a diabetic whose blood sugar had escalated to three times a healthy level and acid-reflux medications to a woman with chest pain.

The clinic is the brainchild of Takashi Michael Wada, a physician with two UCLA degrees. He learned of the plight of Cerro Azul, located 30 minutes south of the U.S./Mexico border, from a church member who had grown up nearby. "An infant had just died of dehydration, which is preventable,'' Wada recalled.

"The woman asked if I'd be willing to come down and look at some other families who were having medical problems and who didn't have access to medical care."

When the student group learned of Wada's activities, members asked to accompany him. Soon the undergrads were raising money to buy medical equipment, medication and food for Cerro Azul residents — as well as for Los Angeles day laborers and Central Valley farm workers.

Now the students line up transportation and enlist professional volunteers, including doctors, pharmacists and sometimes dentists. They even coordinate with a Cerro Azul resident who announces upcoming visits to the community over a loudspeaker attached to his truck.

The 16-hour, roundtrip commute to and from Westwood makes for a grueling day, but the students don't mind. "Without us, they don't have medical care," said first-year UCLA medical student Marc Montecillo, who started making the trips when he was a biology major at UCLA. "It's a very important job that we're doing here."

"Pretty much the entire trip is organized by the students," said Wada, now director of Pasadena's Public Health Department. "I just have to show up that day. They do an amazing job."

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