Dentistas

Yesterday, Esperanza hosted a free dental clinic for many of the clients in the Puerto Plata area. Eight dentists from Santo Domingo came up with a group called Smiles for Life. The clinic was held about fifteen minutes outside of Puerto Plata near the community of Muñoz, where we work with the women. The Muñoz community is the remnants of an old Baté or sugar cane community. Sugar cane was once the largest industry and export from the Dominican, but the current President, Leonel, has spent his last four years in office ramping up most of the countries economic efforts towards attracting tourism and has practically abandoned the sugar cane industry altogether. What is left, are many low-income communities that are filled with Haitians and Dominican laborers who no longer have any work or education systems in place. If you cross the highway, literally fifty yards away from the deserted cane fields, you will find one of the many new resorts/golfcourses that has sprung up along the Northern coast of the DR. It would basically be like California deciding that it was going to stop its fruit production and divert all of their efforts/resources towards condo development on the coast. A few rich people would have a nice place to go vacation, but millions of the immigrants and domestic workers in this industry would be up a creek. Meanwhile, the food shortages and prices would just continue to escalate even further for those around the globe. I’m getting distracted from my original purpose with this entry. All that is to say, that the dental clinic where I spent the last two days was nestled nicely into one of these old cane fields.

People came by the dozens. As only seven or eight could be helped at a time, crowd control over the other fifty people waiting in line was a full task in itself. One of the beautiful things about the slow-paced and sometimes inefficient lifestyle found in Latin America, is that the people are pretty content waiting. While my Dad would have gone bazurk, these people just quietly sat for a couple of hours in order to receive such a free service, despite any of the inefficiencies they had to wait through. We had the group sit and wait in another building where we took advantage of the opportunity to share some basic, but much needed information. Several of the doctors from the clinic shared about nutrition for infants, STD’s, HIV/AIDS, and general health, while a pastor shared about Jesus with each group of people as well. Since most of the lessons were done in Creole, I found my purpose entertaining the little grommets running around by pulling a surgical glove over my head and inflating to the size of a beach ball. My favorite part was when Nancy, this sweet old lady that stands at about 4.5 ft tall came running over to me to try and help me get it off, thinking that I had somehow accidentally got my head stuck in the glove and I was suffocating as it kept inflating bigger and bigger.

While this young girl probably wouldn't qualify for a dental assistant in U.S, these people would gladly take whatever they could get

I spent most of my afternoon in the clinic itself, which was just a big room that had been converted into a makeshift dental/orthodontics office and oral surgery room. I seated the waiting patients into the room and then commanded each to open their mouths. It was my job to see if they needed to have their teeth pulled out, drill and fill the cavities, or just get a good cleaning. I now have a whole new appreciation for the thousands of dollars that my parents poured into my mouth growing up.

The highlight of my afternoon was getting to spend about an hour as one of the oral surgeons assistant. I held a flashlight for him, got to snip some stitches, and documented a couple of the surgeries. It was so knarly! I was truly amazed at the speed and precision that all of them (the hygienists and dentists too) worked at to crank through about two hundred patients. One of the coolest surgeries I got to help with was a young man that had to sets of upper teeth, kind of like a shark, where a short row of teeth lay behind his primary row of top teeth. A lot of Nova cane, yanking, blood, and a few stitches later, the guy was good as new.

All in all it was a great couple of days. The crew of dentists were a blast to be around, and the five or six members of Esperanza from the Santo Domingo office that came up were really enjoyable to be around too. What I appreciated most, was huge impact that a few people were able to make when they took a little bit of their time, skills, and energy to share with others. What was fifteen minutes of work for one of them, meant years of less pain for one of these individuals.