A Dental Perspective - Feliz Navidad

A Dental Perspective – Feliz Navidad

So yes, this blog update is long overdue, Chalice and I felt it was finally time to update everyone on what we have been doing these past 5 weeks in Tanzania.
Our first working experience was at Nkoaranga hospital working with Dr. Frank Nnko. We spent our first week at the hospital treating his patients under his supervision. Dr. Frank is a master at extracting teeth and was very patient with us the first few days as we struggled to get some of those stubborn teeth out. Dr. Frank’s classic line “Hakunashida” (meaning no worries), his loud deep laugh, and constant Christmas carols made us feel quite at home in his clinic. There is nothing quite like working for 9-10 hours a day listening to Feliz Navidad on repeat in the middle of July on a mountain, in Africa.
Week two was easily Chalice and my favourite week of the trip thus far. We ran a community dental clinic which was advertised in local churches and schools. Everyday for 3 days we arrived at the clinic to find up to 10 people sitting outside waiting for us to open shop. In 3 days we saw 165 patients. We had one dental chair and one make shift chair set up and worked until all the patients who turned up that day were treated. We encountered many challenges as we worked such as occasional power outages, limited numbers of our favourite instruments, and huge language barriers. The Medical and Nursing students came to our rescue in many occasions on their breaks helping us by holding flashlights, translating, and sterilizing extra instruments. Chalice and I also learned to be very resourceful and realized how spoiled we are at home with a wide selection of tools and instruments to choose from. We also tried our best to learn some dental terms is Swahili while we were there such as “Where does is hurt”, “Sit”, and “spit”. Asking people to spit was one of the most interesting parts of the treatment. Since we were working with one real dental chair and one fake chair there was only one bowl for spitting in the clinic. Every time we asked the patient in the fake chair to spit we would point to the bowl on the opposite side of the room and say “tema hapa” meaning “spit here”. Nobody ever spat there. People spat on the floor, they spat in napkins, they would spit in the wrong part of the bowl and once a young boy simply marched over to the window and horked through the grate. Needless to say it was always exciting to see how “tema hapa” would be translated.
Once we completed our community clinic, we descended from the mountain back to Arusha to work at the Seventh Day Adventist Clinic (SDA) with Dr. King and Dr. Zuma. This has been a totally opposite experience from Nkoaranga. The clinic is much more well equipped and the treatment options available to patients is far more abundant and expensive. The patients on the mountain could choose from either an extraction or a filling while the SDA clinic offers pretty much everything dentists in Canada provide. At SDA we are treating a wide range of patients with a variety of problems. This is teaching us a lot as well as helping us learn to keep up with the pace of a regular dental office (no more of those 3 hour appointments).
We continue to work at SDA on select days but have also completed dental screenings in the evenings for the boys belonging to Children for Childrens Futures (CCF). Up to this point we have completed all of the screenings and are working on arranging appointments for them to come in for treatment before we leave Tanzania.
This week we have started our screening for 8-9 year old children who attend Themi Primary School. Today was the opening day of our screenings and created quite a buzz. A newspaper reporter and a news program turned up to cover the event. We are told we will be on the Arusha news tonight, and the weekly paper this weekend. So if anyone out there is a subscriber to the Arusha Times, keep your eyes open for us….

- Abby Donovan

PICHA!!!!!

1) Abby and her assistant, Kasia, at the Nkoaranga Community Dental Clinic.

2) Chalice also hard at work at the community dental clinic, assisted by Paulo.

3) Learning how to read a malaria slide? Good job, Aaroni.

4) The kids at the Nkoaranga Orphanage looove stickers, and friends like Cotton!

5) Traditional Zanzibar dhows on the beautiful dusk backdrop
6) Sun rising on the Serengeti
7) Hanging out with the CCF Arusha boys!!