Monday - My first day of work! This involved meeting the dental team from here on the ship, loading 2 Land Rover jeeps with all our needs for the day like water, food, uniforms, etc. and driving 45 minutes on busy roads to the dental clinic location. At the clinic I got a short tour, met the local "day crew" who are paid Congolese working as translators and also helping with clinic jobs, had morning devotions together, and then started treating my first patients. The dental clinic is located in a compound shared with the HOPE house where patients can stay before or after surgery when they need treatment but not hospital care. Overall the dental area is smaller than the facility where I worked in Togo, with 9 dental chairs total divided into an air conditioned treatment room for 8 patients at a time to see the dentists for fillings, extractions, and follow-up care, then one chair in a separate hygiene room for me to remove massive amounts of calculus from teeth. My room is nice and quiet, but unfortunately does not have working a/c right now... only a fan. Temperature wise it's usually tolerable - except maybe later in the afternoon, but the suction unit has a bad habit of overheating and stopping several times a day (or several times a patient on a particularly warm day). Normally this wouldn't be a huge problem, but I need to use the ultrasonic scaler on high with lots of water for each patient because my hand scaling doesn't even make a dent on molars completely covered in 30-year-old calculus. When the suction unit stops working, I can't use the ultrasonic scaler because it fills the patient's mouth with water, so the cleaning comes to a screeching halt and we just sit there waiting for the motor to cool down. Thankfully 7 or 8 patients a day is the max for me, so my hygiene schedule has some room for forced suction cool-down breaks. I also have an amazing hygiene assistant whose primary job is translating to my patients in French, but also helps me suction to remove water during treatment and clean my room between patients. We try to finish most of our scheduled patients in the morning before the entire clinic has lunch break around 12:30. Options for lunch are always meat and cheese sandwiches or African cooking, which could be very tasty or could possibly include wads of cow stomach with your beans and rice... I tried that particular dish and then decided it was definitely a sandwich day for me. After lunch, some extra hygiene patients are usually added, but all dental patients are finished in 2-3 hours. Then it's clean up time and the Land Rovers get packed again with all our stuff including trash and biohazards for disposal on the ship. We usually time our loading and departure just right to have a "welcome-out-of-work" committee of young orthopedic surgery patients in leg casts recovering at the HOPE house and ready to give us hugs while looking for candy or balloons. After time with the little patients, the ship crew says goodbye to the day crew and it's a long bumpy ride back to our home on the Africa Mercy. So that's just a glimpse of my first day and a typical work day for me at the dental clinic. Because this is Africa, some less typical events have also occurred during this past week, but I'll have to share those stories another time. Please keep the dental team in your prayers for continued good health, team-work, and that all equipment would be running well this week. Also pray that as a team we would provide compassionate, effective treatment to the patients God sends us and because of the love they see, patients would have open hearts to the Gospel message presented. Thanks!
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| Australian dental therapist and dental assistant with American dental hygienist :) |
