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!!

Things you learn in Tanzania

Well hello everybody! It has been a great weekend for all of us! Paul, Chalice, Abby, & Genni headed off to Zanzibar to enjoy a relaxing weekend at the beaches while Aaron and Kasia headed off to climb up a volcano (I'm sure Kasia will post a blog about her exciting adventures doing that!). Sam and myself were able to go with Deepal (an MO-er from last year's team who has returned to do a scholarship program for the CCF kids)up to the Maji Ya Chai. Deepal had arranged for the CCF Arusha boys to have a soccer match against the Maji Ya Chai CCF boys, so we tagged along to hang out and watch the game. They were all AMAZING players!! We had a great time hanging out with the kids, just loving on them, playing soccer with the little ones (since I am NOT talented enough to have played real soccer with the older boys!), and sharing candy with them.

I've been keeping track of some of the strange, entertaining & interesting things that we've noticed about Tanzania, so I thought I'd share some of them with you!

- no matter who you are or where you are, it is apparently completely socially acceptable to pick your nose at any given moment. Digging for gold included.

- There are no fenced in fields of grazing animals. Single cows and goats are literally tied up in the ditches at the side of the road.

- Chickens are EVERYWHERE. We have yet to determine how anyone actually keeps track of who's chicken belongs to who.

- "Muzungu's" (aka non-African people, usually white skinned) are a hot item to be stared at, waved at, pointed at, and frantically yelled at with a "Mambo Muzungu!!"

- Perhaps most surprisingly, everyone has a cell phone. I was in one of the clinic waiting rooms and an elderly Masaai woman (a VERY traditionally dressed tribe) carefully put on her glasses and then pulled out a cell phone and started texting. Who knew!

- It is not uncommon for the electricity to just cut out for minutes to hours of time. This happened to us a few times at the hospital during surgeries - with no back up generator! - causing us to grab our flashlights and headlights for light.

- real toilets are hard to find, they're usually just holes in the ground. Toilet paper is even harder to find, followed by paper towel or even normal towels to dry your hands.

- It is perfectly acceptable for bugs to be everywhere - one day we were working in the maternity ward with this HUGE green grass-hopper just hanging out on the patient files. If bugs like this were found in canadian hospitals I'm pretty sure four residents would be trying to shoo it out while four nursing students shrieked and begged the residents to not kill or hurt the bug (but please still get rid of it! lol).

That's all for now! Tutaonana rafiki's!!!

xo Court