At the invitation of Charles Vickery, leader of the Unitarian Fellowship of Mexico City, last winter I visited the Capital City and made many valuable contacts. Kirk Raab of Beecham Laboratories, México, is now donating valuable medicines, notably Ampicillin. We also affiliated our birth control program with the “Fundación para los Estudios de Población” as México’s fourth pilot project in rural family planning. Charles Vickery and his friends have made two trips to our clinics with loads of clothing and medical supplies, which have been greatly appreciated.

Our experimental plantings with high-lysine corn were only partially successful this last year, due to the fact that the husks opened as the ears matured, allowing rain to enter and rot the kernels. This year, with help from Charles Vickery, we obtained a variety of the high lysine corn developed in México, and hopefully better suited to monsoon climate. Results of this season’s plantings will be available soon.

The pleasure of working at our clinic in El Zopilote, which we designed and built from scratch, has made us all the more aware of the shortcomings of our physical plant in Ajoya, an old adobe house falling apart at the seams. We hope to build a new clinic next to the new water tank on the hill overlooking the village. In June, George Dueker flew down with Dr. McKean, surveyed the site and gathered data in order to make the architectural plans for us. The villagers are ready to help. If we can raise the funds for it and work out the political snags, work on the new-clinic will begin soon.

Special Thanks

I would like to thank all those who have driven supplies down to our clinics from the United States, especially Dr. Carl Monser, who, with the help of friends, brought down two microbuses packed to the gills, and Kingsley Douthwaite, who brought a whole trailer load of goods.

Getting supplies from California to Sinaloa is one of our major problems. They cannot be sent by post.