La Republica Dominicana

This has been a long time coming... with a lot of procrastination and excuse making keeping it from happening, but now its time. Here is the post about my trip to the Dominican Republic.From the picture here you can see how hard we worked and how tired I must have been from the grueling days of nothing but dental work... Ok not quite.
We arrived in the DR late Friday night and rushed to the hotel to check in and get to sleep. We got an early start the next day. That day we worked in a local school and set up in a large common room. This first day was the most "interesting" since most of us didn't know the specifics of setting up and taking down this mobile dental clinic. Soon enough, though, we got it going and started cranking out some dentistry.
So here are some shots from that first day. The area that I spent most of this day in was apparently infested with fleas or some sort of biting insect cause my legs were covered by the end of the day.
Here was the oral surgery area. As you can see people would sit on lawn chairs and get their teeth extracted. It worked pretty well all things considered. We had actual fold up dental chairs for people getting fillings done. We also had a root canal station, two children's specific tables, and some places to do cleanings.



The second day went really well. Instead of being in one large room we divided up into a couple rooms and that really helped streamline the process, plus we all knew what we were doing that day. That day I gave my first injections and did my first extractions. Dan (my fellow second year) and I were in charge of sterilization, but some of the doctors brought family members and they were able to do sterilization for us some of the days so that we could do some dentistry. That day I had a chance to work with 3 different doctors and a couple fellow students to learn to extract teeth and give injections. I was so busy that day that I didn't get any pictures.
The next day (Monday) we were at another school, which was interesting because the kids were in school. So as we arrived the school wasn't sure where to put us and we got a chance to see the kids running around during their recess. I have no way of really describing just how different it is there compared to how you and I went to school here in the States. The kids, though, were so excited that we were there and were mobbing us.
Here are a couple of pictures of the kids swarming us to get pictures taken with the Americans. It was really fun. Then they found us a place to set up and we got to work.
These first three days we were in the capital city Santo Domingo. The next two days an LDS ward on the outskirts of the suburbs invited us to work out there in Boca Chica for a couple days. They offered the church for us to set up in, which was a very nice place to set up shop and we were able to work in there very comfortably. It was quite odd to be working in the chapel and doing sterilization on the sacrament table, but there was plenty of room and we were able to get things running smoothly getting people in and out quickly and efficiently.


Here we are in the chapel. I was able to do quite a few extractions and injections these two days as well.Here I am extracting a tooth with Dr. Scott Grant, who is a CASE grad and was a student leader for the DR program when he was in school, just like I am. The most beneficial thing about this trip was the chance to learn from the doctors that accompanied us down there to help out. All in all there were 11 doctors to 17 students, so we were able to get a lot of one on one attention and learning. The doctors also gave us these mini seminars every day to help us with our dentistry and our transition out of school and into practice.

The first five days of the trip were spent cleaning teeth, sterilizing instruments, giving shots, and pulling teeth. Each day seemed to go so quickly and yet we accomplished so much it seemed like it must have been longer. Once the week was over it had felt like I accomplished a month worth of work.

In the evenings after our work day, we were able to have some fun and do some various activities. And I will write about all of those fun things in my next post... probably tomorrow.