Is A Kenya Dental Mission In Your Future?
Can you imagine pulling 645 teeth in a week, especially if you are just a freshman in dental school?
Why would 2000 people line up outside out hospital clinic in the heat of the African summer on the equator?
Why would our full time missionaries in Kenya wait with Leonard, our patient from Olmekenyu who had his nose eaten away by tuberculosis, for six days in a dank, dark Nairobi hospital while the boy was examined and the diagnosis confirmed?
Well, the questions could go on and on, but the bottom line is that we offer hope to the tens of thousands who live in the land of the Masai Mara and its surrounding environs. We came to a long forgotten area of Kenya over a decade ago and we never left. Many years have passed; many have traveled to this exotic land with us. Typically, one third of our 20-25 Kenya Medical Outreach mission teams are alumni now, one third are our friends from our area (Atlanta, Georgia) who have never been on our mission, and one third are, amazingly, strangers who found out about our trips from either the suwaneedental.com or kenyamo.com web site. They take a leap of faith and sign up with us sight unseen. Our team members have come from California, Florida, Missouri, Boston, Dallas, Mississippi, the Carolinas, Tennessee and beyond.
The makeup of our team is typically this: one dentist (DMD or DDS), maybe two, a few predental students, some high school students, several teachers or housewives, a physician (MD or DO), three nurses (RN or LPN), perhaps a dental hygienist (RDH) and either a nurse practitioner (NP) or a physian’s assistant (PA). Pastors, businessmen and pharmacists may round out the group in any particular year.
What is a typical day like on the mission field? In Olmekenkyu, we built three bunkhouses and have a kitchen / dining hall for serving our team breakfast. The number of patients for dental and medical services builds as the morning dawns and by 8:00 a.m. fifty are in line. We finish our toast, boiled or fried eggs, Kenya tea and by nine o’clock when we begin seeing patients, there are three hundred in the line. We divide into medical, dental, optometry, worming stations. Some of our team hike up the hill to the Olmekenyu Primary School to work with the students, teach, lead Bible Study, or meet with the school administrators about projects we support like water tanks, glass window installations for classrooms or concreting floors.
The dental team is six or seven team members strong. We work with a local dentist, Dr. Daniel from Narok, as our coverage on the mission and we have an ample number of surgical instruments donated by Dr. Arun Nayyar and others to perform extractions, although we have my portable Asceptico dental unit for fillings and scaling. Our system is this: we numb ten patients, extract, numb ten patients, extract, numb ten patients, extract. We go for hours like that, doing mostly simple extractions, sometimes surgical extractions and an occasional filling or ultrasonic scaling. Tea time is honored as our team takes a break at 11:00 a.m. and then lunch at one or two in the afternoon. Our team usually has a designated camp cook and the food is generally outstanding, even when local produce and meats such as chicken, lamb and goat are in the offering.
The experience for non-dental folks in the dentistry department is memorable. Getting up-close and personal with the how-to and techniques of exodontia is a certainty. Pulling a tooth is common for lay folks on our mission trips. Dental students become fully capable and competent to handle almost any extraction after being on one of our mission teams. The experience is worth a fortune to any dental student ready to graduate into the real world of private practice; just ask Matt Milner from the Medical University of Mississippi School of Dentistry, Hubert Park from Tufts University School of Dentistry or Caroline Norment from the Medical University of South Carolina School of Dentistry.
The opportunity to give back to others who have no ability to receive but by the grace of God those dental services we offer is why we do what we do. In the areas we go to, there is no dentist, no physician to see them; there are no instruments, no supplies, no anesthetics, no clinics where people can seek help for even a simple tooth ache. They are left with primitive options by untrained nurses who have inadequate tools for the job. Where we go, we try to train the nurses and give them a set of proper instruments for tooth removal. We show them the techniques for gaining adequate dental anesthesia so that their extractions are painless. It’s the least we can do because we’ll be gone in a few days….until next year.
In Kenya, at the equator, the sun sets at six o’clock, so we try to be completed by then each day. More than once we’ve worked by flashlight in the dark. Each day we may see over 100 dental patients and 200 medical patients in our clinics. Its rewarding as well as tiring. The dinner hour is a time of reflection on the day and talking about what transpired in our individual clinics. Man, the stories we hear - the tales that are told! There is never a dull moment on mission in Africa.
To learn more about Kenya Medical Outreach, Inc. go to www.kenyamo.com or www.suwaneedental.com/kenya/2010.html
Bill Williams, DMD, MAGD
Director, Kenya Medical Outreach, Inc.
Founder, Suwanee Dental Care
Founder, Solstice Dental Advisors
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