Hola everyone:
Our young team of dentists and hygienist graduates from the Class of 2013 have completed their first dental mission with DFA. This team was completely new with the exception of Dr. Don who had been the previous year. The number of patients we saw and procedures we did were incredible. We saw 278 patients, completed 1194 procedures which included 19 endos. We had a great team; Ali, Courtney, Susan, Jenny, Cheylene, Don our hygienist, and Bev and I with Don. Ken rounded up the team doing the sterilizing. We had both Oscar and Jayson doing the interpreting for us.
Our working conditions were a little tight with 4 dental spaces and a sterilizing area. We had to move bags and boxes out of the house each day to provide us with more space. Initially, we had some small problems with electricity but we were able to fix that, albeit with a generator that was fairly noisy! We had one power outage of about 2 hours, which isn’t really too bad!
The weather was typical for this area of the world, crazy hot during the day, very warm in the evening, but very cool around 2:00 AM and we definitely needed a blanket. Some even slept in a sweater in addition to the blanket.
We were lucky that we had a new Church with the new tile floor which was very nice to sleep in. There were not a lot of bugs around and we did not see any scorpions. Surprisingly there were very few mosquitoes in the village, although there were more at the Hotel Austria.In our constant journey of learning, we had a new challenge – the travel toilet. Although there was a steep learning curve it did work well for those who required it. The trip was great but now Bev and I are ready for our few days off. One final exciting piece of news.
The University of Alberta Dental Student Association raised $42,000 for Dentistry for All. Blaine and Trudy will be receiving the cheque on Monday at a media event. What an amazing contribution – thanks so much for all your hard work!
Will give you more info later but for now, I’m going to bed.
Take care,
Dennis
