Wally Austin, left, a pilot with Flying Samaritans, and Bob Kline load up Austin's Cessna with construction tools that will be used for building a clinic in Baja California.

Lindsay A. Miller / arizona daily star

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Teeth rotted by lime juice. A little girl whose nightgown caught fire from a candle, severely burning her. Babies slowly starving to death.

This is what keeps Flying Samaritans going back month after month to the villages of Baja California.

Started in 1961, this nonsectarian, nonprofit group now boasts 10 chapters in California, Arizona and Baja California, serving 19 clinics up and down the Baja Peninsula.

The Tucson chapter, with about 100 active members — medical professionals, pilots, interpreters and helpers — serves El Rosario, a village of about 5,000 that lies about 150 miles south of Ensenada, Baja California.

Tucsonan Mary Kay Bush, who volunteers as a dental assistant, still remembers the pre-clinic El Rosario where she and her late husband, Austin Bush, a dentist, first volunteered.

"He did dentistry in a rocking chair," says Bush. "The caneback seat was gone, so we put a board there."

As for that makeshift clinic's surroundings: "It was held in the grease bay of a closed-down gas station," says good Samaritan pilot Wally Austin. "Another time, it was held in a lean-to behind the building. You could see sky between the boards."

A pilot since 1976, Austin has been flying supplies and volunteers to Mexico since 1987.

His wife, Judy, a registered nurse, is the pharmacy coordinator and buys the medications in Mexico. Meanwhile, Bush serves as clinic coordinator at El Rosario, which finally got its clinic — built by Tucson's Flying Samaritans — in the late '90s.

Once a month, these Flying Samaritans fly in for a two-day dental clinic and one-day medical clinic, offering everything from dental care to pediatrics. During specialty clinics, villagers also get free eye exams and glasses, as well as hearing aids. A woman's clinic also is held.

Many of the patients have missing teeth from sucking limes, which eats away tooth enamel. Volunteers try to steer them away from this common practice. "Everyone also leaves the clinic with toothpaste and a toothbrush," says Judy.

Photos taken at the clinic show Judy holding a healthy toddler who as a baby was starving to death. "Her mother was watering down her formula," says Judy.

Another photo shows a smiling Wally Austin sitting next to a little girl now recovered from burns after her nightgown caught fire.

The Flying Samaritans were able to get her a humanitarian visa and fly her to the States, where the Shriners flew her to a Houston hospital for skin grafts.

"She would have died without it," says Bush.

Buoyed by their success in El Rosario, Tucson's Flying Samaritans now are building a clinic in the tiny village of Laguna San Ignacio, about 300 miles south of El Rosario.

It began with the whales.

In 2003 some of the Tucson chapter members went whale-watching near Laguna San Ignacio, populated by 800 or so living on what's described as a wind-swept sandbar.

Invited by the local populace, a small group of volunteers began a trial clinic later that year.

Today they hold clinics every other month, either in a community center with thatched roof and dirt floor, or in a schoolroom. There is no electricity, no running water.

Dentists use portable dental units powered by compressed air in scuba tanks.

After the locals offered to donate land and labor, a clinic started going up last July. A generator will supply the power to the 1,400-square-foot building. Water will be trucked in from the town of San Ignacio, an hour's drive away.

Austin, now retired from a contractor's rental equipment business, is overseeing the project and is flying everything from toilets to volunteer construction workers to the village. He also buys construction supplies from Baja vendors.

Expected to open in February, the clinic also will be served by a few members of the Phoenix-based Los Amigos chapter. In between visits, a portion of the clinic will remain available to villagers.

Arizona chapter expenses, which run about $30,000 a year, are covered through donations and an annual golf tournament held in Tucson. Members also pay for their own food and lodging, as well as fuel for the airplanes.

"Sometimes people ask what we are doing in Mexico to help people. They ask, why not help those in the U.S.?" says Austin.

"What we are doing is giving these people hope and better health. And with that, maybe they can have a better life, a better job and stay at home."