CAPE MAN TAKES FLIGHT TO HELP SICK, INJURED IN BELIZE

In 1954, the U.S. Navy taught A.J. Seier to fly jet fighters. He turned to the law after leaving the Navy, but through his years as Cape Girardeau County's prosecuting attorney and Division II circuit judge, he maintained his instrument and commercial pilot rating.

Recently Seier put his flying skills to use in the Third World on behalf of an organization called Wings of Hope.

"After retirement you start looking for things to do to help other people," he says.

"...I wanted to do some humanitarian service, and it was an opportunity to fly on the edge a little bit. I wondered if I could still do it."

Seier underwent a year of training with Wings of Hope before he received the assignment. His flying abilities were tested and he was shown ways of adapting in a Third World country.

Wings of Hope is a non-profit, nondenominational St. Louis-based group that has more than 90 planes and pilots operating in rugged places where they can do a world of good: Indonesia, Zaire, Bolivia and American Indian reservations, among the many.

Belize, which is the size of New Hampshire, has only one hospital and four main roads, making transportation to medical care difficult.

That's why Wings of Hope is needed. Many of the people needing medical care must go to Mexico or Honduras.

Wings of Hope is under contract to the government of Belize. Its missions are authorized by the minister of health.

From mid-July to mid-August, Seier slept on a cot 10 feet from his airplane. The plane was parked in a hangar on an airport in San Pedro, a town of 2,000.

He rose each day at dawn, helped prepare the plane to fly and waited for the phone to ring. It invariably did. Sometimes he piloted two flights a day.

One boy was flown to a hospital because his leg had been broken and an artery cut by a machete. Another boy had an injured eye. "They saved the eye but he lost his sight," Seier said.

Many of his passengers were pregnant young girls about to give birth. One 14-year-old passenger was about to have her fourth child, he said.

"Most of them hadn't been in an airplane before. I had to act like nothing was wrong. These people were scared to death."

He also transported a missionary who had broken his foot, and a student from Normal, Ill., who broke a foot playing volleyball.

The plane, which is designed to carry cargo, brought medical supplies back to the villages on its return flights.

Seier compared the plane he flew, a Cessna 206, to a Mack truck. It had been modified to take off with a heavy cargo on a short runway. Sometimes those runways looked too short and the palm trees at the end too tall, Seier admits.

A Wings of Hope pilot was killed and another remains comatose as a result of a mishap while Seier was there, but unpredictable weather and lack of communication were the primary difficulties he encountered.

"A thunderstorm spit me out at 13,000 feet over a three-layer jungle and there was nobody to talk to," he said.

"Thank God for an American Airlines pilot at 33,000 feet who told me I was still over Mexico."

Belize has no weather reporting stations and little in the way of radio communication with air controllers. "It's just pilot-to-pilot," Seier said.

Belize is a beautiful land of mountains, jungles, waterfalls and beaches, but Belize surprised Seier. "They have jumped from the 17th century to the 21st," he said.

Most of the population is poor, but Seier tells stories about a garment factory in the jungle hooked up to the Internet and the owner of a thatched-hut general store who was talking to New York on a cell phone.

He found a Branson T-shirt at a shop in the Guatemalan jungle.

Seier kept his friends and co-workers at the law firm of Oliver, Oliver Waltz and Cooke apprised of his adventures through letters he titled the "Ambergris Chronicles." In one he wrote that the rich people in Belize are "composed mostly of American scuba divers, old men with sweet young things and characters that look like they came out of a Hemingway book."

Ambergris Caye is the name of the island San Pedro is on.

He would work for Wings of Hope again, he said, but wonders if it's necessary to go to a foreign country to be of service when there are places in the United States -- the Four Corners area, for instance -- that need the same help.

The experience was all he hoped for, Seier said.

"I spent a lot of time just observing the beauty of the country. The Lord has really made this a beautiful world.

"I have a sense of thanksgiving I was able to see this."