Teeth

One of the volunteers, Corey from Guam, is going to be a dentist. He just finished undergrad, but has known forever that he wants to take care of people’s oral health. All through college he did internships at dental clinics, and has a real passion for serving people in poor communities because he recognizes the close connection between oral health and overall health outcomes. After this year, he will most definitely go to dental school. It’s so funny being with someone who sees the world through the lens of teeth. After about a week he suddenly piped up with, “how is it that people here have such good teeth/” And as we thought about it, it seemed true. The kids all seem to have these stunningly bright white, straight toothed smiles. We conjectured that the lack of high fructose corn syrup in their diets must help, as well as all the water they drink. Another time, when we were at the Food for the Poor warehouse, Corey found 4 boxes of trial sized toothpaste packets. He was ecstatic! He’s already working on a community outreach plan to get toothbrushes and toothpaste into the hands of the families in the neighborhood around the school. Then today when we visited the Missionaries of Charity, the usually joyful Corey was really somber on the way home. I thought maybe he was just overwhelmed by the whole thing, but later on this evening he finally explained his sadness about the day. He told us that in the last half hour before leaving, after playing with the bigger kids and feeding them lunch and making them laugh for hours, he walked back into the room with the most sick babies. He found a little girl with a really swollen face and neck, and his dental training and a quick check of her lymph nodes told him for sure what it was. I can’t remember the name, but basically she has some kind of dental abscess that had become infected. Her little body was doing everything it could to fight this infection, but he explained that without a surgical procedure to drain the puss and antibiotics, she would spike a high fever, and suffer terrible pain, and probably die within a few weeks. Any child presenting with those symptoms in an American hospital would be treated within days, but this little girl might not ever get that treatment.

For me, ignorance was bliss today. Corey’s life experience and expertise revealed to him a terrible truth.