IRVINE : Students to Install Cooler at Baja Clinic

To help sick people beat the heat, a group of UC Irvine students today will caravan to the Baja California town of El Testerazo to install a swamp cooler in a clinic run by volunteers.

“This swamp cooler is something we’ve been waiting for for years,” said Jodai Saremi, one of 15 members of the campus Flying Samaritans chapter who will make the trek to the clinic about 30 miles south of Tecate.

“In the summertime, it’s extremely hot down there. The patients really need a more comfortable atmosphere,” said Saremi, 21, a junior in biological sciences who has been donating her time to the clinic since 1988.

The clinic, an abandoned house converted by the Palomar chapter of Flying Samaritans eight years ago, is open one weekend day a month and serves an average of about 30 to 40 patients. The patients have ailments ranging from bronchitis to high blood pressure to clef palates and heart defects, Saremi said. The more serious cases are referred elsewhere for treatment.

But the desert heat makes things uncomfortable for patients, volunteer doctors, dentists and nurses alike working in the three-room house, she said. A swamp cooler, which operates by fanning hot air through a water-soaked material similar to a bale of hay, has been on the Flying Samaritans’ wish list for years.

Last fall, the 142 members of UC Irvine’s student chapter took on the cooler project. They raised money by holding a Haunted House at Halloween and operating booths at the city’s Harvest Festival and the university’s open house, Saremi said.

Now, the group has scraped together enough to pay about $200 for the cooling unit, plus an additional $800 or so it figures it will cost in extra labor and materials.

“We think the whole project will run over $1,000 when you add the plumbing, electrical work and ducting,” Saremi said.