How did a Ballard small-animal veterinarian end up fighting poverty in the Philippines? Ask Dr. Rick Zander, who with his wife Esther, lives on the Philippine island of Negros Occidental, helping to raise the quality of life there. It was time to look outside the valley, says Zander, noting that the pastoral lifestyle can make residents immune to problems in other communities and cultures.

We live in Never-Never Land' here in Santa Ynez. But poverty is a serious concern in the world. The seeds of terrorism are sewn in the soil of poverty. In desperate times, people resort to desperate remedies. Growing up in Virginia, and Maryland, Zander knew little about desperation. He loved animals and always knew he wanted to be a vet. ìI was the one who tried to save injured birds, and animals with broken legs. Discouraged from going to college to get a degree in veterinary medicine because his grades were poor, Zander joined the Air Force instead, and visited the Philippines for the first time. He loved the tropical climate and beaches, but never dreamed he'd return to live there, choosing California instead. He worked at Intellux, an electronics manufacturing company in Goleta while taking classes at Santa Barbara City College. He eventually graduated with a biology degree from Cal Poly and got into U.C. Davis's prestigious vet school. On Christmas night in 1972, Zander discovered the Santa Ynez Valley for the first time. He discovered it the hard way; he and his wife were victims of a head-on car collision. Their doctors, the late Drs. Casberg and Folker, treated Rick in their Solvang offices after he was released from the hospital.

We were living in Pismo Beach and I'd never even seen the Valley. As I drove along Alamo Pintado, I fell in love with the area. I told my wife she had to see it, that it would be the perfect place to raise our kids. Charmed by the quaint village of Ballard, Zander noticed former Ballard vet Dr. Paul's sign and wondered if the veterinarian wanted a partner. Zander was in luck; Dr. Paul wanted to sell his business.

The Zanders raised two daughters, Heather, now 28 and living in Chicago, and Marianne, 25, who works in advertising in Los Angeles. I was right, says Zander, it was the perfect place to raise kids. Everybody takes care of everybody else. You couldn't ask for a better community. Zander might still be in Ballard, administering feline leukemia shots and neutering male dogs, if he hadn't gone back to the Philippines in 1998 with a Rotary Group Study Exchange.

For five weeks, he and his team visited different businesses in cities and villages to see how they compared to the team's own companies. Zander saw vet hospitals, but instead of being moved to help, ìI was repulsed by the poverty and degradation on Luzon, the main island. The population was out of control. Filth and disease were everywhere.
Then Zander visited Dumaguete, an idyllic city not unlike Ballard, but quite a bit larger and he found the Philippines he'd remembered all those years. It was clean and the people were easygoing. He found a Rotary Matching Grant project to help amputees obtain prosthetic devices so they could walk again. In the process of working on the prosthetic project, Zander learned about an irrigation plan to provide water for 500 hectares (over 1000 acres) to aid small farm development.

His initial visit as a six-week volunteer ended in February 2000 and he returned a year later as a long term volunteer and has been there ever since. The Rotary group helped put in ten wells and five small check dams with surface pumps, which benefited over 300 farm families in five villages. Additional projects included an animal distribution proposal, and a micro-lending program in which individuals could borrow money to start small businesses. In addition, the program provides training sessions for the participants. Two local Rotary clubs - the Solvang Breakfast Rotary and the Santa Ynez Valley Rotary - worked with the Bacolod North Rotary in the Philippines, along with Rotary Districts in Japan and Nebraska. We all put money in and came up with $12,000, then Rotary International put in $100,000 to give us our total.

In addition to the Rotary project Santa Barbara based Direct Relief International donated medical supplies and equipment, local resident Peter Robbins helped find computers-45 were shipped to the Philippines - for donation and he also assisted with upgrades to bring them up to par. St. Marks in the Valley Episcopal Church, the Solvang Library, San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara County Schools donated close to 2000 books. Now, the Zanders live on the island of Negros Occidental, in the city of Bacolod, population 400,000. It's a far cry from Ballard, says Zander, who, on his third day in their new rental, returned home to find a robbery in progress. People were working in the yard next door and saw the thieves handing the television over the fence, but they didn't interfere because it wasn't their business.

The air in Bacolod is carbonized and smells of diesel fumes and smoke from burning trash and sugar cane. You miss clean air that you can't see, Zander remarks. You also miss the peace and quiet we take for granted here. In Bacolod, the cries of screaming children, barking dogs and motorcycles are punctuated by occasional gunfire, or maybe it's just firecrackers, says Zander. Life in the villages is simpler and the air is fresh except when they are burning the rice straw. That's where I prefer to be, Zander remarks. What makes Zander want to help the unfortunate? It's like the kind of calling you get to become a pastor or a missionary. I can't explain why I'm doing what I'm doing. I just felt this tug to do it. He has felt the tug, ever since he toured human hospitals in Uzbekistan back in 1995 and saw that his own vet clinic was better equipped. At that time, he helped send a twenty-foot container full of drugs and medical supplies back to Samarkand.

ìI don't look at this as a "mission",' but once you get into the villages and meet the people who live there, when you go into their homes and eat with them, you see how they live and you think, "I can do something to help.' And you do. You do it because you can, and you do it because you must. Isolationism is dangerous, as 9/11 has made very clear. People who have nothing will look at any opportunity to improve their life. But they don't have to resort to terrorism. We can help show them another way of life.

That's what I'm trying to do.