Project Connie Aids Mexico Quake Victims : Ambassador Gavin’s Wife Arranges L.A. Treatment for Injured Children

They met at the airport in Mexico City, two little strangers brought together by the lingering horror of September’s earthquake. Vianey Cruz Palacios, 9, approached Adriana Moguel Barrera, 9, and asked shyly, “What are you missing?” Adriana pushed back her dark hair to reveal the place where her right ear should have been. Then Vianey lifted the black patch to show the empty socket where her right eye had been.

On the airplane bound for Los Angeles, where both girls would receive medical evaluations, they approached 12-year-old Claudia Torres Mendoza and asked, matter-of-factly, “What are you missing?” She had lost her mother in the earthquake and then had lost her father, Claudia told them. Vianey’s face lit up, she grabbed Claudia’s hand and they skipped down the aisle; Vianey had made another bond. Vianey had lost her mother and father in the earthquake.

Also on that flight were 19-year-old Alejandro Barron Perrones, who lost both legs in the earthquake, and 11-year-old Juan Mendoza Camargo, who has burn scars over 90% of his body as a result of an earlier tragedy, a November, 1984, explosion at a liquefied-gas storage site at San Juan Ixhuatepec. They were being brought to Los Angeles largely through the efforts of actress Constance Towers, wife of U.S. Ambassador to Mexico John Gavin.

$100,000 Goal

Towers has a mission--she’s dubbed it Project Connie--and her immediate goal is to raise the $100,000 she estimates is needed for surgery and/or prostheses for Alejandro, Vianey, Adriana and Juan, and to find adoptive American families for Vianey and her four younger siblings and for Claudia and her three younger sisters. Some of the children’s medical problems are not quake-related, but were brought to her attention because of last year’s temblors.

Towers knows the limits of her efforts--the Sept. 19-20 quakes left at least 6,000 confirmed dead, 2,000 missing and presumed dead, and 18,000 injured in a country already gripped by severe poverty. She knows the Mexican people “need tremendous help, on the government level. But this is on a human level.” She sees things this way: “You start a group of little bonfires. If they ever join force, there’s a great big bonfire.”

She knows, “As we find one (case), there are two behind that one.” Still, she is determined that, with the help of people like Janet Rogozinski, a bilingual, bicultural transplanted Alaskan working through the Agency for International Development in Mexico City, she will be able to find, and help, some of the “really destitute.” “We’re out there on the streets,” she said, “gathering them up as fast as we can.”

It was a fortuitous bit of fate that directed Janet Rogozinski to the U.S. Embassy a week or so after the earthquake. Her husband had received an erroneous bill from the IRS and had asked her to go to the embassy to straighten things out. Fighting her way there through the traffic and chaos, she started wondering if there was some way she could be more effective in helping victims. Since the day after the tragedy, she had been distributing food and clothing through the National Volunteers.

By day’s end she’d connected with representatives of Aid to International Development and the U.S. Office of Disaster Assistance, who were coordinating private and public relief efforts; right away they saw that here was someone who knew Mexico and the Mexicans and could help them with the nitty-gritty such as getting permits and customs clearances.

“We’d have 30 or 40 calls a day,” Rogozinski said. “People were sending shoes, sending this and that. We’d figure out how to get it to the volunteers who could get it to the people who were most needy.”

Later, Rogozinski was placed under contract to the A.I.D. until September (the U.S. government allotted $45,000 for Rogozinski and two assistants and for operating expenses) to continue coordinating assistance efforts. As the months have passed, the focus has shifted.

U.S. Sponsors Needed

For example, she said, on her desk now is the case of a single mother with two young children and another expected any day. She lost her tenement home in the earthquake and the family is living in a shelter. “She doesn’t even know where to begin” to rebuild a life, Rogozinski said. Money sent by a donor in Irvine will take care of immediate needs, such as a bassinet; Rogozinski hopes to find a family willing to sponsor this family, and others, on an ongoing basis. “Twenty dollars a month can make a lot of difference,” she said.

Two weeks after the earthquake Rogozinski received a call from the embassy; Towers wanted to go to the Military Hospital to visit some of the “miracle babies” (so called because these infants had been pulled to safety after days buried in the rubble) and to see how she could help.

They met, and discussed broader needs. “She needed someone on the Mexico side of the border who could filter information on to her so she could find assistance on the (American) side,” Rogozinski said. “She’s been low profile but very, very active on this from the beginning.”

Their first case was 19-year-old Alejandro Barron Perrones. The private Spanish Hospital, where he was a patient, had come to the embassy asking for help in getting dialysis equipment; 187 patients in the 300-bed hospital were quake victims and those who had been pinned beneath rubble for a long time were at risk of severe kidney damage. Hospital representatives told Rogozinski about Alejandro, a double amputee who needed rehabilitation in the United States.

“We immediately got involved in all aspects of his care--therapy, psychological,” Rogozinski said. “I brought him to the attention of Mrs. Gavin and she made arrangements with a doctor at UCLA,” where he is scheduled for surgery on Sunday.

Alejandro is one of about 7,000 quake victims who are amputees. “When they couldn’t move the debris,” Towers explained, “they simply cut you out of it.” Alejandro, in fact, was not cut out but lost his legs to a rapidly spreading gangrene.

Alejandro, who was an athletic 6 feet 4 before his legs were amputated, first just above the knees and later at the hipline to halt the gangrene, is a handsome young man who is introduced as a “computer whiz.” He laughs and smiles readily and does not dwell publicly on his tragedy.

He wanted to live, with or without legs. Rogozinski tells of Alejandro lying in the hospital, hooked up to a dialysis machine, his legs eaten by gangrene, overhearing the doctors conferring: “We might as well let this one die . . . “ Later, the surgeon faced with amputating the legs of this strong young basketball player wept. Ultimately, it was Alejandro who made the decision.

Alejandro recalled, through an interpreter, that awful Thursday, Sept. 19: He was at Conalep Technical School, in a third floor hallway, “talking with a friend. We were just getting ready to go into class.” Then, with no warning, the building collapsed. The friend who had been standing next to him was killed. As Alejandro was fleeing the building, a concrete and steel column fell on him.

For 11 hours he lay pinned under the rubble, “just wondering if I was going to live. I was in a lot of pain. I thought maybe all of Mexico went down.” There were long hours while he listened to the voices of the soldiers and Marines, digging their way through the bodies and debris. Finally, Alejandro said, “At 4 in the afternoon we made contact.”

Alejandro spent the next five months in the hospital. He was brought home once, on New Year’s, to be with his parents and three siblings, but when he reached the house he chose not to go in. Said Rogozinski, “He had left home for school that morning a whole boy. He was coming back four months later with a good deal of his body missing. In the house there were shoes, bikes, basketballs, pictures on the wall to remind him . . . “

A psychologist, arranged virtually free of charge by Rogozinski’s staff, has been counseling Alejandro, helping him to face the reality of living without legs, and the limitations of the prostheses for which he will be fitted after a first surgery at UCLA to repair nerve damage to his right arm, which suffered a compression injury.

“He’s a wonderful boy,” Rogozinski said, “he really is.” She recalled the first time she went to visit him at Spanish Hospital: “I was petrified. I’d never had to face a boy without legs. But within five minutes we were laughing and joking. Alejandro doesn’t sit around with a long, draggy face.”

Constance Towers, who commutes between Los Angeles and Mexico City in her dual role as actress (on the daytime soap opera, “Capitol”) and wife of the U.S. ambassador and official hostess to visiting dignitaries, happened to be in Los Angeles the day the earthquake struck. The next day, flying over Mexico City in a helicopter with her husband, she had her first real glimpse of the devastation--”It had cut a swath, like a curving serpent, through the city.”

In the almost five years since John Gavin reported as ambassador, Towers has learned that “the ambassador’s wife can get a door opened” and, seeing the huge need after the earthquake, she wanted to help. Previously, she had worked with retarded children and children with multiple sclerosis at a government hospital and had encouraged wives of other nations’ ambassadors to “get out into the community.”

Since the earthquake, Mexican agencies have been overwhelmed, their resources severely taxed or depleted, and Mexican families “have their own crises,” Towers said, pointing up the continuing need for assistance from this side of the border. Water, food and shelter are still a major problem; still, Towers said, the people of Mexico City are becoming “a little more optimistic” as time passes, as the rubble is cleared and “they’re getting rid of the reminders.”

‘Thank You, America’

Towers said she has been “overwhelmed by the response of Americans.” She spoke of the graffiti that has sprung up around the city: “Thank you, America,” of people saying, “Thank you for loving us. Thank you for taking care of us.”

Towers’ current undertaking is a person-to-person effort in which, she said, Rogozinski is “my Pied Piper,” the one who brings to her the neediest of the needy. “We have very critical eyes,” said Rogozinski, who accompanied the children to Los Angeles. “We believe you can help yourself, too, if you’ve got the capacity to begin again.”

She found a job for one boy chasing balls at a tennis club. Towers told of their buying a new fast-food stand for a man who had lost his stand in the earthquake--”Now he’s back on the street, selling his tacos.”

One of her priorities is finding adoptive homes for five children of the Palacios family and four sisters of the Torres Mendoza family. All were orphaned as a result of the earthquake.

Claudia Torres Mendoza, who accompanied Towers here last week, is at 12 the head of her family, which includes sisters Yvonne, 9; Sandra, 5, and Jennifer, 1 1/2. “She spends her days like a mother would,” Rogozinski said, “a poor mother.” That includes washing her sisters’ clothes in a bucket; there is no running water in the places where the girls live.

Towers told their story: “Their mother was a telephone operator. The telephone company went down in the earthquake and she died. At the time, the father was terminally ill with leukemia” and unable to work as a machinist.

The girls were at home with their father and none of them was hurt. Ordinarily Claudia, a good student who hopes to be a teacher, and the older girls would have been in school but they had temporarily dropped out to take care of their ill father.

The family was brought to Towers’ attention when Rogozinski’s staff took food baskets to them. Later, Towers went to the house to meet the family and learned of the father’s determination to keep his girls from being placed in a children’s home.

The father, Jorge, brought his girls to a holiday party in January at the ambassador’s residence. “His dying wish,” Towers said, “was to find an American family for his girls, to give them this opportunity. (He had visited America). He wanted my word, which I gave. And he wanted to know that they would not be separated. We cried and we talked. And I told him I would do everything I could to be sure his dream comes true.” Jorge Torres Mendoza, 35, died three weeks ago.

“He has put that responsibility in my hands,” she said, “and I do feel that responsibility greatly.” She smiled and said, “If I had a big house, I’m afraid I’d be the lady in the shoe.” (Temporarily, the girls are being housed with friends in Mexico City.)

At 9, Vianey Cruz Palacios has taken on responsibility for her brother and three sisters, who range in age from 7 to 10 months. At first the children were sleeping in a room with 15 strangers, their refuge from the street. Later, a bachelor uncle, whose salary is $20 a week, took them in temporarily, to keep the family together.

“They don’t accept that their mother is dead,” Towers said. Until very recently, Vianey spent much of the time singing quietly to herself. Towers’ attempts to talk with the child about the events of Sept. 19 are quickly thwarted by Vianey’s simply tuning out. Towers remembers the day she left Vianey and her siblings at Sister Rosa’s small orphanage: “Luz Maria (the 3-year-old) asked, ‘Why am I here? What’s going to happen to me now?’ ” She remembers that, overwhelmed by the sense of responsibility, she “walked out in tears.”

Towers reconstructed the trauma of the family when the Nueva Leon building, one in a huge low-income housing complex, collapsed that morning: “The children were lying in that rubble for two days, listening to their mother crying out for them. Then she died.” The baby, Jose Luis, crawled out of the rubble to safety; Angelica, 7; Erica, 4, and Luz Maria were all injured, but are going to be all right. Vianey remembers falling 12 stories, remembers that it was very dark, but she does not know what it was that hit her, gouging out her right eye and leaving an ugly scar that will have to be corrected by plastic surgery.

“Vianey is my biggest concern,” Rogozinski said. Unlike Claudia, whom she describes as “a fighter, a survivor,” she perceives Vianey as “very lost. She’s suffered so much and she has a real fear of suffering more. She feels, in a sense, very abandoned. And she has such a huge responsibility. We will have to find a family as soon as possible. We’re not surrogate mothers. I think children can go through anything as long as they have a parent there to hold their hand.”

Meanwhile, Vianey’s plastic surgery has been put off for up to six months to see if nerve damage will correct itself. Because of atrophying of the eyesocket as a result of emergency surgery in a Mexico City hospital, she will require three operations before she can be given a ball implant and a prosthetic eye. “But we can’t make her wait two years for an adoptive family,” she said. “The prosthetic is important, but she also needs love.”

Families Won’t Be Separated

Towers refuses to think about the possibility of having to separate either of these families. “There’s tremendous interdependence and interaction in these little families,” she said. “We’ll just have to find a family that will adopt five children and a family that will adopt four.” She acknowledged, “It’s a big responsibility, but we’re looking for families who will take these children on with the respect they deserve. I hope it will be in the Los Angeles area so I can see them” from time to time.

A story in a San Antonio newspaper brought about 75 queries, she said, but “not that one situation that’s exactly right. Some responses came from the heart but we knew, economically, it was out of their reach.”

She plans to approach corporations about establishing irrevocable trusts to ensure the educations of the children to ease the financial burden for a family wishing to adopt.

“We think we have the legal entanglements worked out,” Towers said. Adoptive families would need to make one trip to Mexico City but she anticipates the adoption process, in either of the above cases, would take no longer than six months and she promised “tremendous help through the embassy.”

Juan Mendoza Camargo, 11, wore a shy smile and a Los Angeles Raiders T-shirt to which was pinned an array of buttons, some of these souvenirs of his trip to Disneyland the previous day. The shirt had long sleeves; Juan is very conscious of his burn-scarred arms.

Juan was referred to Towers and Rogozinski by the Shriners Hospital in Mexico City. He, too, is an orphan, but he and his five older brothers, whose parents were killed in Mexico City’s November, 1984, gas explosion, are not seeking a home. The oldest brother, who is 19, is supporting the family and sending the 18-year-old brother to medical school. Juan, too, hopes to be a doctor.

Towers brought Juan to Los Angeles to be examined by a Rancho Mirage plastic surgeon, Dr. Rudi Unterheiner, a Gavin family friend who has offered his services without fee to some of the children. All of Juan’s brothers were also badly burned and need reconstructive surgery. “We’re hoping to maybe find a sponsor for the family,” Rogozinski said.

In the meantime, she and Towers are doing what they can. When they noticed that the child was limping badly, they assumed it was because his scarred feet were painful. The problem turned out to be less complex: His only shoes were two sizes too small.

No Complaints

Towers smiled and said, “They never complain. They’ll never tell you they’re unhappy. They’re very quiet--and very sweet. The Mexicans love their children, and the children grow up to be very loving people.”

Adriana was referred to Towers and Rogozinski when she came as a patient to an emergency clinic operated by the Northwest Medical Team, a volunteer group from Seattle; the family’s clapboard shack had been virtually destroyed in the earthquake and, Towers said, “They had been thrown out on the street.” When Towers learned about the child’s missing ear, a congenital defect, she decided to bring her here for medical evaluation; she will return later for surgery. Adriana’s neighbors helped to make her trip possible: Though destitute, they all chipped in to buy her a proper dress.

“As quickly as Janet finds these children,” Towers said, “we’re trying to find solutions.”

“Everything (we have) is loaned, begged, borrowed or stolen,” Rogozinski said. Ford Motor Co. of Mexico donated a year’s rent for her office and she is optimistic about getting funding for several years more.

She does not think in terms of massive aid, but in terms of one-on-one help, maybe a donation of bricks so a family can rebuild its home. Nor does she permit herself to dwell on why a tenement was not built to withstand an earthquake, why a school collapse could bury hundreds of youngsters. “We can’t do anything about the school that fell on Alejandro,” she said, “but we can do a lot about making Alejandro’s life better.”

Towers’ appeal for help has been answered by Western Airlines, which donated the tickets to bring the children here; by Variety Clubs International, which is contributing toward Alejandro’s artificial limbs, and the American Red Cross, which paid for the group’s hotel rooms here, provided some meals and dispatched a vehicle and a male nurse to assist Alejandro. At UCLA, Dr. Yoshio Setoguchi, head of prosthetics, and Dr. Roy Meals, an orthopedic surgeon, have given generously of their time.

Towers hopes to “inspire other people who have wanted to do something,” but needed direction. Donations to Project Connie may be sent in care of the governor of the state in which the donor lives, she said, and will then be funneled to the Chamber of Commerce in Mexico City. She emphasized, “Those funds are audited by the American Embassy. We know where every dollar goes.”

Donations, or inquiries about adoption, may also be sent to Project Connie, P.O. Box 3087, Laredo, Tex. 78044 (That is the mailing address of the embassy).

Towers said her husband intends to remain as ambassador until the end of President Reagan’s second term, but she hopes that Project Connie will be her ongoing legacy, a charity “concentrating on young people.”

Meanwhile, she needs $100,000--and two families able to offer love and security to nine orphans.

“I know we’re going to be able to do it,” Towers said. She quoted Sister Rosa, who runs the small orphanage in Mexico City: “ ‘I put my hands up to God and he gives me food.’ ” Towers smiled and said, “Janet and I are going to put our hands up to God.”