FARMINGTON – Farmington family physician Constance Adler traveled to Mulukuku, Nicaragua, for the first time in 1999, after hearing about the town’s women’s cooperative clinic from a friend.

“I went for a month,” Adler said Wednesday. “For a ‘vacation.'” She worked at the clinic, helping deliver babies, treat diarrhea, malaria, asthma, wounds. “And I just fell in love with the women of this cooperative,” Adler said. “So selfless. So caring.”

Now, with some help, she and some friends have set out to be selfless, too. Adler, Wilton resident Babbie Cameron, local nurses and health care workers, and a Franklin Memorial Hospital affiliated group called the International Health Task Force decided to buy the women of Mulukuku an ambulance.

Farmington-area health workers Tracy Hardy and Mike Senecal went to Mulukuku to study what the area needed most and decided on a $40,000 vehicle.

Nearly $34,000 has been raised, Adler said. She hopes to get closer this Saturday, selling weavings and other crafts made by women in Guatemala and Peru.

Nicaragua is the second-poorest country in this hemisphere, after Haiti. Its population is still dealing with the aftermath of a bloody civil war.

The little town of Mulukuku is in the north of the country. It’s got a population similar to Farmington, about 7,000. It serves surrounding communities on all sides.

Where the Farmington area has 35 to 40 doctors, though, Mulukuku has only one, with an occasional second dropping in. In the United States about nine out of every 100,000 women die as a result of childbirth, but nearly 311 women die in places like Mulukuku. Malaria is rampant. Diarrhea kills babies. Cervical cancer is a bigger killer of women than breast cancer.

Adler, who has been to Mulukuku 10 times, said she has come to love the community and the clinic that serves it, subsisting entirely on international donations. Her eyes light up talking about it. Her husband comes along to help motorize wells and build incinerators. Photographs her daughter took of women there line her walls.

Cameron, who has long been involved in global women’s issues and has worked in war zones – Bosnia in the early 1990s, and Nicaragua during the Sandinista revolution – has never been to Mulukuku.

But it is her work that will make Saturday’s fundraiser possible. “I can do something to help raise money,” she said, “while she (Adler) can do things to help treat sick people.”

“I’m an old hand at fair trade textile sales,” she said. “It’s always been a passion of mine to help local producers, whether in Maine, Haiti, Guatemala – wherever – to be able to keep on with their traditions and have a place at the world table.”

Many women in Peru and Guatemala, their husbands unable to work or killed in political assassinations, have turned their skills as weavers and seamstresses into full-time work in recent years. Cameron, with friends in both countries, helped bring their work to Farmington, to go on sale Saturday.

“It’s spectacular,” Adler enthused, “stunning. There’s a whole range, from high-end tablecloths to finger puppets.”

Elise Hooper, who works in Adler’s office as a billing coder, has seen photographs and heard tales from Adler’s journeys for years now. As uncomfortable as going to Mulukuku would be – extreme heat, lack of modern conveniences – she says she’s become interested in seeing it. She will be working at the fundraiser on Saturday.

“Mavis and I keep telling her we’re going to go with her someday,” she said. It makes her proud to see the people of Western Maine, with their own fair share of hardships, doing so much for others.

It also makes her see the luxuries Mainers enjoy every day. “It makes you appreciate so much more,” she said, “the things we take for granted.”