Salvadorans Help Hometown Rebuild With Gift of Mercy : Refugees: The impoverished residents of Estanzuelas, El Salvador, are getting a much-needed ambulance. Many fund-raising efforts take place among friends and family in L.A.

Friends and neighbors gathered outside Francisco Ayala’s East Hollywood apartment building, eager to catch a last glimpse of a bright red ambulance before it left Saturday on its mission of mercy to a small, impoverished town in El Salvador.

Ayala and a group of former neighbors from the town of Estanzuelas raised $6,000 to buy the ambulance, which Ayala kept in his apartment garage. The vehicle will travel 5,000 miles to serve Estanzuelas’ population of 20,000 people, who live miles over rough, mountainous roads from the nearest hospital.

“Finally,” said Ayala. “We’ve waited so long for this to happen.”

It took a year to raise the money to buy the used vehicle and pay for its transport on Manuel Torres’ big rig for the week-long trek. It is the first major donation made to the town by the Club Pro-Estanzuelas de Los Angeles, one of about 40 hometown associations of Salvadoran refugees who have reunited in exile to help heal their war-ravaged county from afar.

A 1992 peace treaty ended 12 years of bloody civil war that left 75,000 dead and 1 million living as refugees abroad, half of them in Los Angeles. Since then, many refugees who have settled here have joined with friends, relatives and former neighbors from their former hometowns to speed up the rebuilding process.

The associations work closely with friends and family in El Salvador to identify specific needs, then raise money to meet them in many ways: through dances, bus junkets to Las Vegas, picnics and raffles. Even beauty pageants, held traditionally on the feast day of each town’s patron saint, have been transformed into fund-raisers: The young woman crowned queen is the one who raises the most money in pledges.

Donations have been used to rebuild schools and churches, pave damaged roads, build libraries and playgrounds, support orphanages, fund scholarships and provide hospitals and clinics with medicine, supplies and, as in the case of Club Pro-Estanzuelas, ambulances.

“A lot of people have died because they couldn’t get to medical care in time, and we want to save those lives,” said Julia Zelaya, president of the Estanzuelas group and Ayala’s cousin. She plans to fly to the capital city of San Salvador on Friday, then meet Torres in Estanzuelas when he arrives with the ambulance.

The group had planned to hire someone to drive the ambulance to El Salvador for $1,000, but decided to pay Torres, a native of Estanzuelas who is now a trucker in Los Angeles, an extra $600 to ship the used vehicle so it would not suffer wear from the long drive.

For those on the receiving end in El Salvador, a hometown association in the United States means access to aid and goods they could never hope to obtain on their own.

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In Estanzuelas, Zelaya’s cousin, Carmen Maria Ayala, eagerly awaits the ambulance’s arrival. She is the secretary of a clinic improvement committee that raises funds to aid the town’s poorly equipped medical facility, which serves 50 to 75 patients a day.

But in a town where residents can barely afford to fix the bullet holes and missing chunks of plaster that still scar their walls, the committee’s fund-raising has been limited.

“We definitely need more help,” Ayala said in a phone interview. “We’re lucky if a raffle brings in 100 colones (about $11). We need an ambulance badly, because a lot of people don’t have any way of getting to the clinic, let alone a hospital in another town. We need everything here.”

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Once the ambulance arrives, it will be registered to the clinic improvement committee, not the clinic itself, which belongs to the national Ministry of Health. The associations prefer to work with people they know and steer clear of politics and politicians. They rarely channel money through municipal governments.

“Our community as a whole is not very trusting, given what we’ve been through,” said Jaime Penante, president of COMUNIDADES (Comunidades Unificadas para la Asistencia Directa a El Salvador), a coalition of 31 associations based at the El Rescate refugee center in the Pico-Union district.

He said association members “don’t want to see themselves involved with either the right or the left. Their primary objective is simply aiding our people and rebuilding our country.”

The fund-raisers are usually family affairs, with members of several associations and all ages paying a fee to dance, eat and bask in Salvadoran culture. The impulse to help has spread to second-generation family members, many of whom know their parents’ hometowns only through photographs. The younger women take an active role in fund-raising by participating in the patron saint pageants--where beauty is not a criterion and the talent that matters most is making money.

For the next few months, 18-year-old Mayra Lorena Tovar, who left El Salvador at the age of 2, will join four other candidates in collecting pledges at 25 cents apiece for Tejutepecanos Unidos en Los Angeles, a group of former residents of Tejutepeque, her father’s hometown. She hopes to raise the most money and be crowned queen of the feast in October.

“I want to do this because when I visited Tejutepeque, I saw a great deal of poverty there,” said Tovar, who especially wants to help the group continue its high school scholarship program. “Children have no shoes, no clothes, no money to go to school. Thanks to the money this group raises, many of them can go to school now.”