For many Americans, Mexico is seen as a vacation spot, a blend of bountiful blue water and azure skies, Tijuana debauchery and semi-swank resorts.

For Jim McCartney, chair of Sacramento State?s Speech, Pathology and Audiology Department, however, Mexico is more than a leisure-class hideaway. For the past two years, he has been flying to some of Mexico’s less-frequented locales, places without the moneyed touches of the country’s more popular tourist resorts. In cooperation with the aptly-named Flying Doctors, a non-profit, Northern California-based organization of volunteer pilots and medical professionals, McCartney has helped bring much-needed health care and awareness to some of the most impoverished and remote reaches of Mexico.

“This is really a great program,” McCartney said. “It really is good for everyone involved.”

The Flying Doctors program (Los Medicos Voladores) sends medical teams ? composed of a pilot, interpreter, medical professional, and possibly a co-pilot or student ? on four-day trips to villages without access to medical care. The program usually concentrates its efforts on tending to immediate medical needs, which means sending in physicians and dentists.

In addition to using audiology students to assist him, McCartney is bringing along other Sac State students who are willing to help. Since language barriers are sometimes difficult, he said he is taking graduate student Umberto Garcia, a member of the university?s College Assistance Migrant Program, to serve as a translator.

McCartney got involved with the Flying Doctors after receiving an email from the organization in mid-2000 asking for help from audiologists.

“They needed an audiologist, and it just seemed like such a great experience for my students,” he said.

Since then, McCartney has brought students along to administer hearing tests on residents of Hidalgo, a farming community with a population of about 3,000. The town stands in the mountains of the Mexico mainland in the northern state of Sonora, some 150 miles southeast of the border town of Nogales, Ariz.

Though Hidalgo boasts a government-sponsored general practitioner and a Mexican medical school graduate doing a year of community service, McCartney said it needed an audiologist. The town has a significant number of people with hearing loss, attributed to noise from a nearby copper mine and its loud tractors. McCartney’s visit marked the first time an audiologist had visited the town, and in McCartney’s opinion, “They really needed one.”

The response, McCartney said, was immediate and positive.

“The children are wonderful,” he said, “everyone is so friendly and polite. On one trip, we didn’t get through testing on Friday and all the kids still came into school on Saturday voluntarily.”

On his initial visits, McCartney and his students administered hearing tests to a wide-range of Hidalgo’s residents, but mostly to young children and the eldery. In return trips, McCartney brought used and donated hearing aids to give to people who have had significant noise exposure. After all, he said, “finding out you have hearing loss is useless unless you do something about it.”

On McCartney’s next trip to Hidalgo, which is scheduled for mid-September, he plans on visiting and administering hearing tests at a high school about 10 miles away in addition to following up on patients he has previously examined.