Leslie Baer Brown

Although novice filmmaker Leslie Baer-Brown recently won an award for her documentary about the Yanomami, an indigenous people of South America, her trip to their small Venezuelan settlement did not have a happy ending. The village of Ashetoeateri lies within a biosphere reserve, a 45,000-square-mile area of rain forest meant to protect all Yanomami from outsiders. Gold miners have brought diseases that have already killed scores and that continue to spread.

Although novice filmmaker Leslie Baer-Brown recently won an award for her documentary about the Yanomami, an indigenous people of South America, her trip to their small Venezuelan settlement did not have a happy ending. The village of Ashetoeateri lies within a biosphere reserve, a 45,000-square-mile area of rain forest meant to protect all Yanomami from outsiders. Gold miners have brought diseases that have already killed scores and that continue to spread.

Hours after the jet helicopter delivered her expedition into a settlement deep within the Amazon jungle, Leslie Baer-Brown fell victim to uncontrollable fear. She had come to study the Yanomami, an indigenous South American people once reported to be fiercely violent murderers, primitives who gang-raped women for fun. This particular Venezuelan Yanomami village, Ashetoeateri, about which she was making a documentary had previously never been contacted by outsiders.

Hours after the jet helicopter delivered her expedition into a settlement deep within the Amazon jungle, Leslie Baer-Brown fell victim to uncontrollable fear. She had come to study the Yanomami, an indigenous South American people once reported to be fiercely violent murderers, primitives who gang-raped women for fun. This particular Venezuelan Yanomami village, Ashetoeateri, about which she was making a documentary had previously never been contacted by outsiders.

Twenty-five volunteers will travel to Guatemala in July to distribute more than $1.6 million in medical supplies in that country. The trip is being planned by members of Xela Aid, an organization that has already sent materials twice in the past year to the town of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. Xela Aid was founded a year ago by Leslie Baer-Brown after she traveled to Guatemala to study Spanish.

"Yanomami: Keepers of the Flame," a prize-winning documentary written and co-produced by Leslie Baer-Brown of Laguna Hills about an indigenous South American people, will have its Orange County premiere Friday at 8 p.m. at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim. Baer-Brown traveled to the Amazon jungle last fall to make the film, which won first prize in this year's U.S. Environmental Film Festival.

A tiny endangered fish that already is besieged by development and predators is facing new threats that could hasten its extinction. Biologists fear that the fifth year of severe drought, combined with the recent spill of 75,000 gallons of crude oil into the Santa Clara River, could destroy the already shrinking habitat of the unarmored threespine stickleback.

Admirers of Richard Nixon who want to avoid the crowds in Yorba Linda can attend one of two smaller memorial gatherings being held today in San Clemente and Whittier, two other Southern California communities that claim a special affection for the former President. In San Clemente, the site of Nixon's former Western White House, a local museum will hold an exhibit of mementos from his long political career.

She always had the music and the conscience working in two-part harmony. She started playing guitar at 13. As a waitress at a cafe in Orange in the mid-'70s, she sang Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez songs to help pay her way through college. She protested nuclear power and the arms buildup and rallied for the tuna and dolphins. She remembers feeling ashamed as a teen-ager for having money when others didn't.