Finding a Need, and a Place, to Serve

The ferry churned past their hotel without slowing, wind-frothed swells smacking the hull in the darkness.

As the craggy shoreline of Guatemala’s Lake Atitlan faded to a few weak twinkling lights, the ferry captain ignored the demands of Leslie Baer and her husband that he take them back to their hotel.

Hours later, the boat stopped at the far end of the lake. Finally, the captain spoke. If the Orange County couple wanted to get to their hotel now, it would cost them more, much more.

Baer bargained hard. One hundred quetzals, equal to $20, a week’s wages for the ferryman.

But when the captain arranged for a small launch to take them back, her husband exploded angrily, fearing they would be taken for another ride, or worse, end up dead on the lake. Baer, one foot already in the launch, thought only of her newfound mission and the 36 volunteers arriving at the hotel.

“He was afraid of dying. I was much more afraid of not living,” said Baer of that moment in 1994 when she realized that her devotion to aiding Guatemala’s poor meant more to her than her eight-year marriage.

Living, in Baer’s mind, meant leaving the comfort of the known to answer a compulsive need to serve.

Her former husband, Alfred Brown, who reluctantly joined Baer in the launch, says he has little doubt it’s a choice Baer will make again.

“Long-term personal connections are harder for Leslie, because she needs to move on for the greater good,” says Brown, who was divorced from Baer after that night on the lake.

It is the unspoken maxim of the world’s humanitarians, at once selfless and selfish. And at 38, Baer is a believer.

*

Since she first walked away from her Spanish-language school and into the mist-shrouded jungles of northwestern Guatemala, Baer has dedicated her life to a revolution.

At an age when most people are burrowing into their careers, the Anaheim woman is building an international aid group from scratch. In just four years, she has turned her quixotic project to help Guatemala’s native poor into what may be the largest privately funded aid program in the country.

Xela Aid has delivered about $5 million in donated medical supplies since 1993 and has built a school high in the Tojalic mountains. Volunteer doctors have treated more than 2,500 villagers. This June, 20 people received prosthetic arms and legs, and optometrists examined 1,300 people in four days in the village of San Martin Chiquito.

Baer’s goal is to establish a year-round humanitarian assistance program in a country where a 35-year civil war has left most of the rural population destitute, cut off from basic medical care and without vaccines that for a few pennies could save a child’s life.

In the process, she has been kidnapped, robbed and detained at gunpoint by guerrillas. She has bribed officials, browbeat bureaucrats and taken the rifles from 20 flabbergasted soldiers. She has charmed Guatemalan presidents and sweet-talked airline baggage handlers.

Lanky and blue-eyed, she strides through Indian villages, half a foot taller than anyone around, with a brilliantly colored native shawl flung around her shoulders. At dusty street stalls, she pays native women to twist her auburn curls Mayan-style in an electric blue head-wrap shot through with silver.

With thin arms flailing and eyes widened to the size of quarters, she tells harrowing tales of humanitarian derring-do. Enthralled California volunteers find themselves in the middle of the jungle helping her, sometimes without remembering having agreed to it.

“She’s always got a story,” said volunteer Earl Broidy, 66, a Tarzana pharmacist, as Baer held forth, out of earshot, during dinner one night in June. “It’s actually disappointing to be at this end of the table.”

Baer pets pigs, kisses babies. And if anyone cries, she cries too.

She does it all, baffled and admiring friends say, through force of personality.

“Everybody just loves her energy, so they allow her to get away with murder,” said Michael Stuart, head of the Amazonia Foundation, which is devoted to protecting the Amazon rain forest region. He is also one of several men who claim to be her mentor.

On that 1994 night on Lake Atitlan, the 5-foot, 9-inch Baer didn’t just convince those larcenous boatmen to take her to her hotel at a lower-than-demanded price. They carried in her bags.

*

Two deaths brought Baer’s life to Guatemala. She speaks of them as spiritual signposts.

The first death was that of Brother Simon, a Roman Catholic member of the Missionary Brothers of Charity who insisted that Baer should study Spanish in Guatemala--telling her she would find herself there. At the time, Baer was the first non-Catholic coordinator in Orange County of the International Co-Workers of Mother Teresa.

After Brother Simon died in a June 1992 hiking accident, Baer came upon a brochure for a language school that referred to San Simon, the drinking and smoking saint worshiped by some Indians. It was the first sign. Six months later she was in the town of Quetzaltenango, known locally by its Quiche Indian name, Xela (SHEY-la).

“If anyone else had told me this, I would’ve just guffawed,” said Denise Danks, a British crime fiction writer and Baer’s close friend. “Spiritual happenings happen to Leslie. They don’t happen to me.”

The second sign came during a break from classes later that same year. Six men carrying a child-sized coffin passed Baer on one of Xela’s narrow streets, where death comes so frequently that funeral parlors are open 24 hours a day and dusty tombstone shops are cash and carry.

Mourners told Baer that the small boy in the coffin had died of a throat infection. “Can you believe that?” Baer said, still outraged by the memory. “No little boy should die of a throat infection.”

Baer came home to Orange County and told her husband that she was going back to help.

“I can take $100 here to spend on the poor and take it to Guatemala and it’s $500,” Brown recalls her saying. “I wasn’t surprised. She’s the most A-type personality I’ve ever met in my life.”

Baer relentlessly wooed anyone who could contribute to Xela Aid, as she named her group, turning first to Taylor Bladh, her Diamond Bar optometrist.

“She made it sound like she had a whole bunch of people going, and later I found out that I was the first one she signed up,” said Bladh, now the director of the Xela Aid optical team.

In all, she cajoled 42 people--construction workers and doctors, businessmen and musicians--into making that first trip to Guatemala, more than double the number that other humanitarian groups recommend.

She cringes now at her naivete.

“Nobody knew Xela Aid was a figment of my imagination at that point,” she said, laughing her booming laugh.

Her troubles started at the Guatemala City airport when officials swore that half the medical supplies she’d shipped had never arrived. Baer and other directors eventually found the boxes stashed in cargo areas.

Then, on the rutted, two-lane road to Xela, the group’s buses broke down twice, leaving the volunteers stranded for hours while cows and sheep nibbled the grass at their feet. And police detained a pickup truck loaded with medicine until volunteers agreed to treat the officers’ families.

But the mission was working. Team doctors hiked into remote villages and treated hundreds of Indian peasants, most of them subsistence farmers, for malnutrition, respiratory infections and dysentery. Villagers dressed in the intricately woven clothing of the Mam and Quiche Indians lined up dozens deep to have their eyes examined by Bladh and other team members. And construction crews built a home for a woman and her five children who were living in a cornfield.

Bladh remembers Baer bursting into tears when he showed her a young boy, one of several, with permanently clouded vision. He told her the condition probably was caused by pesticides hand-sprayed on the maize fields, which checkerboard the steep mountainsides.

“She was like, ‘Send him to this doctor and I’ll pay for it,’ ” recalled Bladh, who told Baer there was nothing she could do.

At the end of the two-week trip, Baer fled to a Lake Atitlan beach by herself and sobbed. “I was dying. . . . I took everything so personal then,” she said.

*

Baer quickly learned the dance steps necessary to do business in Guatemala. And she performs them with humanitarian chutzpah.

“She’s become very, very cunning, and I say that as the greatest compliment,” said the Amazonia Foundation’s Stuart.

On Xela Aid’s second trip in 1994, Baer enlisted the nation’s first lady to ensure her $3 million worth of medical supplies made its way safely through Puerto Quetzal, a rough port town encircled by a gantlet of trouble. As a gesture, Baer gave the first lady $1.2 million worth of the supplies to distribute to her own favorite charities.

In exchange, then-President Ramon de Leon Carpio loaned Baer a Mercedes truck, his personal driver and 20 soldiers to guard her cargo.

Once out of the port, Baer, skittish of the guns, ordered the stunned soldiers to put their weapons in the truck’s cab. “I told them, ‘You guys are on loan to me. I’m your jefa [chief],” she said. Then she climbed into the back of the truck and questioned the young men about their families as they jounced over potholes as big as they were.

“The thing she has is nerve,” said pharmacist Broidy, who expects to run Xela Aid’s pharmacy in a permanent health center planned for San Martin Chiquito. “She’ll call and talk to anyone if she thinks it will help the organization.”

Baer once rang up the U.S. State Department to protest the grim travel advisory that for years has warned American citizens to avoid travel to Guatemala. When that didn’t work, she complained to the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City.

“I was so naive,” Baer said, laughing sheepishly. “I called them up and told them they needed to change it. I said, ‘I’m here right now, and it’s not right.’ ”

Last month, Baer met with new President Alvaro Arzu. She not only charmed him but also got him to agree to everything she wanted, which included exempting her shipments of supplies from a crippling new tax.

“You get what you’re prepared for,” she crowed afterward. “President Clinton’s never given me 45 minutes . . . yet.”

One of Baer’s toughest challenges is steering clear of Central America’s last remaining civil war, which has claimed an estimated 150,000 lives, created 100,000 refugees and caused another 40,000 people--most of them Indian peasants--to “disappear.”

Although Arzu talks of signing a peace accord in September, Amnesty International’s most recent report says human rights violations continue, mainly at the hands of the police and military.

Baer scrupulously avoids taking sides.

The Xela Aid rules are clear: no politics, no religion, no colonizing. She is not a missionary and will allow no one in Xela Aid to be, kicking out one volunteer who promised villagers an evangelical church.

Last year, her pickup was stopped by three ski-masked guerrillas, armed with semiautomatic weapons, who were rounding up people to hear a spiel about their campaign to overthrow the government. Baer listened politely to the guerrillas’ demand, then said, “We’re busy right now. Could we do this another time?”

Baer laughs now. “The way they looked at each other. It was like, ‘What planet is this woman from?’ ”

After such experiences, Guatemala’s consul general in Los Angeles figured Baer would give up.

“I believed that Leslie would come to me and say, ‘Rafael, I’m sorry. I’m not going back,’ ” said Rafael A. Salazar, the consul. “No. Full steam ahead. She now has more enthusiasm.

“She really is an incredible girl,” said Salazar, who honored her at a 1994 black-tie dinner at which she received a standing ovation from hundreds of Guatemalans. “I say ‘girl’ because she is a girl playing with her dreams.”

*

Even her closest friends find it hard to explain what drives Baer.

“Most people get compassion fatigue,” said Danks, the British novelist. “Leslie doesn’t.”

Her father, Henry Baer, is even more perplexed. “I’ve told her, ‘Listen, you’re doing more than one person should do.’ She just looks at things different. It’s something inside her.”

But late one July night at Lake Atitlan, after an exhausting week of Xela Aid clinics, Baer provides some clues.

Sitting on the edge of her bed in the dark, she describes how her life started over at age 27. And since then, there’s been no time to lose.

“I feel like I’ve lived about three lives in the past 10 years,” she said.

On the day she was born, her biological parents, already scraping by with two children, gave her up for adoption.

Baer’s normal childhood with an Anaheim couple unraveled at age 13, when her adoptive mother died unexpectedly. She ran away to one friend’s home and then another, once taking off for three months to live in Hawaii, where she supported herself by diving for puka shells and stringing them into necklaces for tourists on the beach.

At a swap meet back in California, Baer met a couple who took her to the Morningland Church of the Ascended Christ in Long Beach, a controversial “ashram” that mixed the beliefs of a variety of Eastern religions with popular metaphysics and psychology.

For the next 12 years, Baer’s life centered on Morningland. She married her high school sweetheart there, graduated from Cal State Fullerton with a degree in communications, and got a job working as a technical writer for Hughes Aircraft Co.

The ashram was her home and her family, Baer said, until founder Donato Sperato died and his wife, Sri Patricia, took over. The rules became much stricter. Members weren’t allowed to have children without permission and were encouraged to give their earnings to the church, she said.

“If you spoke out, you stood to lose your whole support system,” Baer said. “They said, ‘If you leave, you lose your soul. . . .’ You had this whole world you were living in that you couldn’t tell people about.”

When she finally voiced her doubts, she was kicked out and shunned by all her friends, including her husband, Baer said. The couple briefly reconciled, then divorced.

A Morningland receptionist said she did not remember Baer and said church leaders were “too busy doing good works” to comment.

But Baer said she was “damaged” by the brutal separation. The experience drives her today.

“I learned something very important,” she said. “If you see it, it’s for you to say. That’s why I’m so vocal. Take responsibility for what . . . needs to be said or needs to be done. . . . I never think anymore, ‘Well, who am I to say?’ ”

*

From the moment she left the ashram, Baer has lived that vow, running at a pace few could match.

“She’s always had a cause,” Danks said. “First there was the dolphins, then the homeless, then the environment.”

She undertook the activist rite of passage and lay down in front of a truck loaded with nuclear weapons. She worked with the homeless.

In 1989, while associate director of public relations at Cal Poly Pomona, she started “EarthWatch,” an environmental radio program that was aired over 27 public radio stations, and later co-wrote an environmental source book.

Two years later, while profiling the Amazonia Foundation’s Stuart for The Times, her interest turned to helping the world’s indigenous poor. She accompanied him on an expedition to the Venezuelan rain forest to study the endangered Yanomani, the last pre-Stone Age tribe in the Americas.

At the last minute, she decided to take a cameraman, and the award-winning PBS documentary “Yanomani: Keepers of the Flame” was the result.

“She’s on an endless search for something beyond the horror of it all, beyond the muck we’ve all become mired in,” Stuart said.

Baer admitted the search has meant sacrifice. Not everyone can keep up.

When asked what her friends think of her mission, a grimace passed across her face and she gave an unexpected reply.

“Some of them don’t understand,” she said, then brightened. “But I have new friends now.”

Bob Rook, Baer’s longtime friend and a Xela Aid co-director, said he believes Baer will “find her peace and tranquillity through something else besides human companionship. When she thinks of God, she doesn’t look up, she looks sideways.”

Now there is Xela Aid. Baer says this is for the long run. Twice she has changed jobs to earn more money, and both times she has plowed her salary increase into the group. She is currently the director of college relations at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont.

She has even found a new love in Wolfram Alderson, the charismatic horticulturist who heads Xela Aid’s gardening team and is as giddy about the mission as she is. He even bought a Guatemalan marriage suit last year, a week before he started courting her.

She has appointed a team of co-directors and says today the work of Xela Aid could go on without her.

But no one believes it.

“Leslie is Xela Aid and Xela Aid is Leslie,” said David Krasnow, the president of VOSH California, a volunteer group that brings vision care to the needy around the world.

*

Out of the shadowy half-light of dusk one night in June, an old tan hearse suddenly appeared, inching over the rough cobblestones in Xela. Behind it, dozens of young girls walked, cradling wilting white flowers.

Baer’s face drained of color as the procession engulfed her.

“Oh my God,” she said, her shoulders sagging, as if each girl’s face held a mute reproach. “Oh my God. This is the girl whose mother called me.”

The small, flower-draped casket held the remains of a 15-year-old cancer victim whose mother had tracked Baer to her Anaheim home six months earlier. Baer had been unable to find a U.S. hospital willing to treat the girl.

Now, this chance encounter in Xela momentarily derailed her. She had done everything she could, hadn’t she?

Later, this moment becomes another spiritual signpost, another night on Lake Atitlan, another tale to tell.

“I felt like I was four years back in the past, back where I started again,” she said. “It was eerie. It reinforced that there’s so much to do and I’m up for it.”

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Guatemala at a Glance

Population: 11 million, most populous nation in Central America; has grown by nearly 1.5 million in the past three years

Geography: 42,042 square miles, about the size of Tennessee

Poverty rate: 51% of rural population does not earn enough to satisfy minimal nutritional requirements

Literacy rate: Estimated 47%; only 41% of children complete fifth grade

Public health: 34% of population has access to health services

Life expectancy: 62 for males, 68 for females

Infant mortality: 1 in 19 infants die before reaching age 1; dysentery, generally associated with impure water supplies, and respiratory infections are the principal cause of infant deaths

Potable water: 43% of rural population has access to safe drinking water

Sources: UNICEF; World Bank; The World Almanac and Book of Facts 1996