Jim Cameron is, in at least one respect, an unremarkable man in this unremarkable town. A farmer, he estimates that 90 percent of its 250 residents share his hardscrabble occupation.
Raised on a farm near Kokomo, the 57-year-old Cameron has spent most of his adult life working his own place just north of Urbana, which covers the countryside like a sheet of Norman Rockwell wrapping paper about 80 miles north-northeast of Indianapolis.
His farm, he says, is ”kind of a ordinary Indiana farm”: some soybeans and wheat, some cows and ”more corn than anything, probably.” When he and his wife, Frances, bought the place in 1961, it was 180 acres and they ran it as a dairy operation. In the years since, it has grown to 825 acres, as they`ve gone into grain and switched from milking cows to beefing them up on the way to market.
It would make a good story to be able to say that Cameron`s first goodwill trip to Guatemala was an epiphany for him, that it awakened him to the fact that there was more to the world than crop rotation and coffee at the local cafe. It would not, however, be true.
Cameron has spent time in Germany, in the Air Force from 1950 to 1954, where he served officially as a mechanic. (”Actually what I did,” he says,
”I played basketball for the 12th Air Force headquarters team.”) Since 1967 he and Frances have hosted 18 high school exchange students, about three- quarters of whom he received Christmas cards from this year. ”In fact, we`ve visited almost all of them in their homes in their countries, and a lot of them have been back here, some of them three or four times,” he says.
”All that stuff up there on those shelves is all gifts from different foreign countries,” he says, indicating a wall unit thick with knicknacks in the family living room. ”Swedish glass, Finnish glass, Mexico glass-all kinds of things.”
He is one of 31 directors of the Lions Clubs International service organization and has enough experience with other people and other places to be able to tell a visitor, without any trace of irony, ”I`ve always had an international outlook on life.”
So while you can`t truly say that Cameron`s first trip to Guatemala-to match used American eyeglasses with vision-impaired Guatemalans-was an eye-opener, you can say that it made his eyes open a little wider.
Traveling with area optometrists in 1984 as part of a group called Volunteer Optometric Service to Humanity, he saw things there that he found impossible to ignore. ”I was overtaken by the amount of need for everything in that country,” he says.
When four Guatemalans, who had heard that a Lion from Indiana was there, drove 240 miles in a rickety automobile to ask him if he could somehow come up with a pickup truck that they could use as an ambulance-they make a covering for the truck bed and complete the conversion with an army stretcher-he knew he had found a way to help.
”I decided that I`d try to get `em a pickup truck,” he says. ”I decided against shipping it, because it`s too expensive. So I talked to a couple of Lions in my club and we decided to drive down.
”In 1985, then, I got three other Lions and myself, and we drove a 1948 GMC fire truck and a `75 Dodge pickup down. We bought the fire truck off of a fire truck dealer in Logansport with Lions money donated to the club. We paid our own personal expenses, and we`ve done that every year since.”
He is asked if this was something out of the ordinary for the Urbana Lions club. ”Well,” Cameron says, ”the only thing we`d ever done prior to that was just, like, well, we`d do the Little League ballteam and Pony League and just little things in our town here.”
From such humble beginnings, Cameron`s idea has grown into an annual outing that each year breaks its own record in the category, Most Highway Space Occupied, Charitable Venture Heading South.
It has become a sort of once-a-year traveling medicine show, complete with-depending on the year-more pickups and fire trucks, fancy medical equipment, eyeglasses by the thousands, school buses, real ambulances and, most important, Lions. The number of Americans participating has risen fifteenfold and the number of vehicles eightfold: Fifty-nine people made the trek this year, 12 taking a plane down, the rest as part of the caravan, this year composed of 16 used ambulances.
After the group set out on Thanksgiving morning, a Lions club in Rolla, Mo., served them the holiday dinner, and they stayed, when possible, with other Lions: Oklahoma City the second night, Texas the third.
As the ”wagonmaster,” Cameron tries to plot every day`s resting and stopping points ahead of time, but it can`t always be done. Seven 2-way radios dispersed among the ambulances keep them in contact. Cameron says the 1989 caravan spent $3,800 on gasoline alone-more when you include insurance and various permits. The trip down takes nine days. The group stays for a week, then leaves the vehicles and flies back.
It is an immense undertaking, and not the sort of thing you find listed under ”cold-weather vacation tips” in the Sunday newspaper travel sections. Yet it is one that has gotten bigger every year, and has never lacked for volunteers, most of them Lions members, many from Urbana and surrounding communities.
”My son went last year, my youngest,” Cameron says. ”This year, we had a retired judge and a schoolteacher; we had insurance people, we had real estate, we had just ordinary factory workers that took vacation time to do this project; we had a couple of mechanics, which is always handy; we had some farmers-people from all kinds of different vocations, you know.”
When the group arrives, the already-strained odomoters on the vehicles they`ve managed to scare up show an extra 3,200 miles, half accumulated on U.S. interstates and half on the 2-lane roads of Mexico, where 30 m.p.h. is the average speed and where trouble with corrupt border guards almost sent the 1988 journey back to Indiana with a full load.
For 1989, Cameron wised up. He made arrangments to donate one ambulance en route in Mexico, figuring that would help smooth their passage through the country. It did.
Fruits of pancake suppers
”Comin` into the big city,” Cameron announces from behind the wheel of his American 4-door as it approaches a thicket of shade trees and buildings that he identifies as Urbana proper.
He pulls into a parking lot and gets out of the car, leaving the keys in and the engine running. Leading his visitor into an old church hall, he explains that it is the Urbana Lions building and sort of the geographical center of the Guatemalan project.
It is a hall like many community halls, suitable for everything from Scout meetings to potluck suppers. ”It`s the center of the whole town. Everything happens in this building,” he says.
Three years ago, the Lions spent $15,000 and sweat renovating the hall, putting in a new kitchen and making it generally more amenable. ”This is what a small town can do when they work together,” he says. ”None of this was government money. This was money raised from pancake breakfasts, fish fries, grapefruit sales. . .”
What the Urbana Lions have accomplished in their own hall, he says, is an example, on a smaller scale, ”of what they can do down in Guatemala when they work together.”
Yet for all the community spirit in evidence, not everyone in the area is as enamored of helping Guatemalans as Cameron and fellow club members are.
”We get that quite a bit: `You ought to be helping people here instead of going down there and helping people.`
”Some people around here,” he says, ”all they can see is what`s right in front of `em. They`ve got blinders on. I just tell `em that here, you`ve got everything. I mean, people here, if they want to, they can achieve just about whatever they want if they have the will to do it.”
Plus, he says, ”You know, here in this country, we have all kinds of programs to take care of people that are down and out, or whatever. But down in that country, they don`t have anything like that. So it`s just survival of the fittest.”
Avoiding the politics
Guatemala is a mountainous country of 9.4 million people ”about the size of Tennessee,” Cameron says. It sits between Mexico, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador on the Central American isthmus, Its own polticial turbulence has been overshadowed in recent years by that in Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Panama, but the effects on its people are no less striking.
Cameron and other Lions believe, however, that what they do transcends politics, and their experience to date has proved them right: no problems and good relations with both the government and the military, he says.
Part of this may come from the fact that the bounty they bring with them is dispensed strictly through local Lions clubs. If a town wants an ambulance, Cameron says, it has to form a Lions club, a type of gentle blackmail that he hopes will not only boost Lions membership but also continue to help the towns long after the ambulances have been sold for scrap.
Farming is not farming in the American sense of the word. ”Their soil is very rich, but it`s on the side of these volcanoes, you know, these mountains. So they can`t use any kind of mechanical farming tools. Their tools down there are a machete and a hoe and that`s about it.
”These people are hard workers. If people had to work like that in this country”-he laughs-”there wouldn`t be much done, let me tell ya.”
In six years, he says, they`ve fitted more than 25,000 Guatemalans with prescription eyeglasses and left behind many more pairs for local doctors to attempt to fit. They`ve brought down wheelchairs, diabetes testing machines, medical supplies and baby incubators. The vehicle tally to date reads as follows: 2 school buses, 3 vans, 4 firetrucks, 12 pickups and 23 ambulances.
He says there is almost no feeling in the world comparable to matching a 45-year-old woman with eyeglasses so that she can weave again. ”They`ll thank you five or six times and give you a big hug. And their favorite saying in Spanish-and I`ll translate it to English-is `God will pay you.` ”
As farming back home grows harder-”It`s not the best thing to be in,”
he says. ”If you make one wrong move, you`re just about done for”-Cameron says he comes to anticipate the trip to Guatemala more and more. ”After you get back home, wow, you can`t wait to get back down there.
”It`s just a thing that you get to feeling that maybe you can help. And the satisfaction that you get out of helping people that`s a lot less fortunate than we are here-I guess that`s the reason we go back every year. It`s probably the most satisfying thing that I`ve ever done in my life.”
