Last week we posted about the work we did in Honduras and how much it was needed. I've had several people ask about what it was like and what I thought about the trip. I'm going to do some follow up posts talking about this.
To start with, there is a great need for medical and dental care in that part of Honduras. Every morning there was a long line of people waiting for us. In a city of about 18,000 people, this isn't surprising. What surprised me was how far people were traveling to get to us. I think the winner of the "I came the farthest to get this dental care" award goes to a family of four who got up at 4:00 am to walk 3 hours to catch a bus for a 2 hour ride to see the dentists. When that story got out, closing time got pushed back a bit to help that family.
As a translator, I spent a lot of time talking to both the patients and the dentists. All of the patients were appreciative of the work being done. That is not too surprising. What surprised me was the comment "Gosh, these guys are easy to deal with." I heard words to that affect from every member of the team, at least once in the week. I'm a translator not a medical professional, so this did not make much sense to me. I asked for more details. Everybody replied that in a US clinic, if you made somebody wait 4 hours before seeing them, you probably would have a handful on your hands when you did see them. Not here. Every one of these people knew that you were there to help, every one of them appreciated the work you were doing and every adult tried to cooperate with you as much as they could. That was a nice change for the dentists.
To continue on, let's take a walk through the clinic and see what the first patient of the day would have seen. You already know what the line they stood in would look like. Once the clinic started, they would go to the registration desk. There they would fill out a form that would give the Dentist the information needed to do the work safely.
From here, you would spend some time waiting to be examined.
After a dentist had seen you, you would probably get some x-rays.
Here is one person getting x-rays done.
This is a fully portable system. Here we were using a digital receiver to capture the image and put it onto a laptop computer. It can as easily work with photographic film. The emitter runs on the same battery as a DeWalt 18 volt drill.
From here, a patient would be looking at where the cleanings and fillings were done.
Here is what this person saw when they stood up:
The left hand chair was cleaning. This is the one that Norm Fryberger and I worked in 2007. The right hand chair was for fillings. Tammy Stelling and Paul Moore kept that chair again this year.
After the cleaning and filling, they may have to go out to the extraction area. On the way, they passed where Monica Moore was running the sterilization and supply area. This looked something like this:
The picture does not do justice to the mounds of donated tooth brushes and toothpaste just around the corner. Just to the right of this is the statum, used to sterilize the hand pieces for re-use.
If an extraction was in order, they would then go to the waiting area for extractions out on the veranda.
This area was separate from the others. It looked like this:
This could be rather ominous. Behind the curtain was a very cheerful lady by the name of Abby.
Between Abby's good cheer, Dr. Fetsch's skill and some good chemistry, things went very well here. Several times I had to explain that the extraction really was over. The teeth were gone. Many of the adult patients had been to a dentist when they could not afford the cost of the anesthetic, so they had work done with out any pain killer. That didn't happen here.
From here, the patient would spend some time waiting to make sure there was no bleeding problems from the extraction sight before they went home.
One thing to bring up:
Earlier I mentioned that the adult patients cooperated. The kids had to be worked with some. For that we had a secret weapon: Beanie Babies. Last year, Dr. Moore brought a few Beanies down for the kids. In the press of things, he forgot them until we had a kid who just would not sit still. This child needed most of her teeth removed. Dr. Fetsch described trying to do an injection as being like trying to sign your name on a basket ball while it was being dribbled. The child was reciting the 23rd psalm in her terror. It just was not happening. Dr. Moore remembered his bag of beanies and went and got them. Great idea! After some negotiation the little girl agreed to hold still in exchange for a white kitten.
After that was over, we got to talking with the Honduran translators. It turns out that Beanie Babbies are very popular with the kids down there. And also pretty rare. We decided that next year we would bring more. Ann Milster (my mom) heard about the need for Beanie Babies. She does volunteer work with Fish ( a local aide agency in St. Louis). She gets a few of beanies from time to time. She got to collecting them. She got others at Fish to collect them also. Dr. Moore brought down more beanies. Between the collections from Fish and Dr. Moore, we had a Beanie Baby convention in Talanga, Honduras. Here they are on the largest table we could find:
Every child who came to see the dentists got a beanie baby and or a prayer bear from the church. We still left quite a few of them with Cindy Ceballos for other teams to use in their work later on.
I hope this leaves you with a better idea of how the clinic runs and how much it is needed. I will post more about the team in Honduras.
Have a good evening,
Blair
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