It’s the mid-morning rush at Hospital Infantil de las Californias, and the waiting area is packed with young mothers cradling newborn babies, all wrapped in heavy blankets to protect against the December chill. A handful of apple-cheeked toddlers mill about the brightly painted play area along the back wall of the room; others cling tightly to their parents’ sides, faces taut with expressions of wary uncertainty.

This is what success looks like to Dr. Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Jones.

Only 15 years ago, the place these young Mexican families now come to for ambulatory care was a barren piece of gravelly, government-owned land, tucked away in the boonies of industrial Tijuana, just a few hundred metres south of the U.S.-Mexico border crossing at Otay, Calif.

Now the site is home to a 22,000-square-foot pediatric day hospital, the only one in Baja California, which provides free or subsidized care to indigent Mexican children.

As Jones enters the hospital’s front door, she is greeted with a warm hug by one of the hospital volunteers. Newcomers on the 250-person staff may only know her as head of the nutrition department, the always-upbeat woman who teaches young mothers about the health benefits of breastfeeding.

But the hospital’s longtime doctors and nurses know the bigger story: that Jones is also the hospital’s founding chairwoman, an expatriate Canadian without whom the hospital might not exist.

“We started from nothing — no money, no backing. It was just a crazy idea that we thought would work,” Jones says. “We didn’t realize how difficult it would be.”

The unlikely tale of how Jones came to build a hospital for the poor in Mexico begins with a love story in 1955. Then a 21-year-old Calgarian, Jones came to San Diego for a vacation after graduating with a degree in nutrition and dietetics from the University of Alberta.

It was on a southern California beach during a hunt for grunions, the silvery-scaled fish that in summer come ashore to spawn, that she met a young veterinarian, Robert Jones. After a whirlwind romance, Betty Jones abandoned plans to settle in Alberta and moved to San Diego.

“I came down to find out if it was for real and decided, yes, it was for real,” she says.

Jones received post-graduate degrees from San Diego State University and the University of San Diego before going to work at area hospitals. In 1976 that she was approached by a Catholic sister to volunteer at a tiny pediatric clinic just 30 kilometres south in Tijuana. A group called Project Concern was desperate for the help of a nutritionist to educate doctors and patients alike.

“Once I got bitten by Mexico, it was infectious. It’s the feeling that, in many ways, you can actually make a difference,” she says. Read more