Mountains and Teeth

The Friars host 6 Medical Brigaides a year in their hospital San Benito. A medical team of doctors, dentists, nurses, surgeons etc is brought in for a week to provide surgeries and medical care to the poorest of the poor. Each brigade brings new faces, new cases, and new challenges. We as Missioners support the Brigades by preparing food for the patients and their families, helping prepare patients for surgery, translating, and visiting with the patients after their surgeries. Two brigades ago we were finally able to realize a hope we've had for quite a while to bring dental care to the mountains. There are several priests with whom we work that had been asking for dentists for quite some time. God definately provided because an American dentist with years of experience working in the mountains of Central America had been consistently arriving with the brigaides to work out of San Benito's clinic but had at the same time been expressing interest in returning to work in the mountains. With the help of a portable dental unit he is able to go anywhere there is electricity, light, and water to work, he can work then even, as he says, "on somebody's front porch." So he and three of us Missioners (to help assist and do intake, translate) set off for a trial day. We drove the three hours into the mountains of San Luis, set up all the equipment and attended to 10-12 children, basically just doing extraction dentristy. It was my first experience assisting and I learned very quickly it takes patience, a sense of humor, and a strong stomach...sucking blood and spit and being handed extracted teeth is not for the faint of heart. It went very well and Father Balthazar was really excited to finally be able to offer the service to his people.
So...this last brigaide we set out again for three days working in two different villages of Father's this time. We worked again in San Luis but then traveled for the day to the even more remote village of San Rafael. Its really incredible the need in the mountains. A combination of poor education, lack of supplies and lack of dentists makes for some pretty unhealthy mouths. It was difficult to see at times the results years of lack of care can produce. We worked on a young girl who was only 12 years old, already her four front teeth were false and we removed three more permanent teeth, if we had had time we could have removed more. Many many people even at a young age wear dentures. We took 7 teeth out of one woman, finishing off her upper teeth. The majority of the people we saw had seen a dentist maybe once or twice before, some never. It is really convicting as always to experience the lives of the poor first hand, to see what becomes normalcy when living without. In many ways their lives are more simple and more beautiful but we cannot lapse into idealizing the situation. There lives are also very hard and burdened; there is a great amount of suffering and struggle that exists that we have no concept of. We must be honest and real about our responsibility to love them and serve them. Our hope is to continue to return to these aldeas and to not only treat the emergencies but work on prevention and education, to improve their quality of life and quality of care. Hopefully they will experience the love of Christ in us in this humble opportunity to care for them, as always we returned more changed and affected by our encounter with the poor than they ever will be by us. We hope to return in June to the mountains, this time making two different trips and hopefully bringing along a Hygienist for more cleaning and prevention work...as always keep us and the poor in your prayers.