Copyright 2006 Denver Publishing Company
By ROSA RAMIREZ
Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO)
A donated 1997 ambulance started a journey of more than 750 miles on Friday to an AIDS shelter in Mexico, a gift to patients who are often denied medical transportation because of their illness.
“A lot of these residents are alone. Because of their illness, their families have abandoned them and they can’t find support from the community,” said Carina Munoz with Rotary Juarez Integra in Mexico, one of the groups involved in the project.
“This will be the first time they’ll have an ambulance.”
Her group, along with Aurora Gateway Rotary Club, Rural/Metro Ambulances, a national company, and other Rotary clubs, worked together to donate the ambulance to the shelter, just across the border from El Paso, Texas.
“Unfortunately, AIDS is not understood by anybody. It has the connotations leprosy had in the Middle Ages,” said Chuck Crosse, president of the Rotary Club in Aurora.
Several Rotary members, including Crosse, are driving the ambulance to the shelter. They also are taking 10 computers, donated by the Westminster Rotary Club, that will be used to educate the town’s people about HIV and AIDS.
“Anything that’s new, people don’t understand. They’re scared and afraid that if they touch this and you touch that, that it will be transmitted. People need to be educated. But until people are well-educated, you need to step in,” Crosse said.
David Dalla Pozza is director of Caritativo Para Enfermos de SIDA, the AIDS shelter that will get the ambulance.
Since he started working there three years ago, he has seen 40 people die from AIDS.
Pozza, a native of Italy, said the ambulance will allow the shelter to transport people to the emergency room quickly.
The shelter conducts prevention classes for single mothers and men. It also provides residents with trade skills and helps them find work.
“People who are living here feel comfortable because it’s not too big here. We provide them with individual attention and give them psychological and spiritual counseling,” Pozza said.
The idea to send ambulances to Mexico took shape more than a year ago during a conference with Rotary members from Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, said Ramon Alejandro Garcia, president of Rotary Del Norte Juarez.
The first ambulance was donated last summer to a health center in a town of about 5,000 residents southeast of Ciudad Juarez.
The town’s only medical center didn’t have an ambulance and relied on slow private ambulances.
“The need was so much, that within the first five minutes we presented the ambulance, an employee from the center said, ‘Excuse me, I have to go pick up a person,’ ” Garcia said in Spanish.
The center employee transported a woman whose appendix had burst.