Day 4, Getting out and working

This morning, we crowded into our minibus with people from KCH’s dental clinic and folks from the government dental program and headed to Mchinji, specifically the Home of Hope Orphanage. Chances are you’ve heard of the place. It’s where Madonna adopted two children. I saw no sign of her intervention on the behalf of the rest of the children.

We stopped on the way out of town at a 7-Eleven to pick up whatever we wanted to bring along to eat along the way. I settled on a croissant from the bakery counter, a Nestle Crunch, and an orange Fanta. I wanted to set a good example.

It takes about an hour to drive there, and along the road we passed dozens of tiny gatherings of huts built of homemade mud bricks and thatched roofs. Apparently, brickmaking is an important job, as there were rows of fresh bricks drying beside every such hamlet. The more “urban” areas brought back my foggy memories of Mexican border towns. I think it’s just what poverty really looks like. I spent most of the time talking to one of our preceptors, Dr. Silas Bere from Zimbabwe. Trying to explain American politics in three or four sentences is difficult.

The roads go from paved, to dirt, to one-lane dirt as we arrived at the orphanage. Like any property here, it’s surrounded by a brick wall, although this one was set with jagged sections of broken glass across its crown. The gate was operated by one of the older orphans.

When the minibus had finished meandering through the dirt path that ran between the buildings, we exited beside a playground that consisted of a rusted metal set of monkey bars and a merry-go-round. Only one boy, I’d guess 7 or 8 years old, approached us and then climbed the monkey bars. He was nibbling on the end of a toy tobacco pipe made of a spring and a bowl.

While the staff from the hospital assessed our facilities, I played with the children. Thankfully, the ticklishness of feet is not specific to North America. They started suspicious, and then simply cool, and then began to play back. They were particularly excited about the camera, and they loved looking at the pictures as soon as they were taken.

In groups, the kids were lined up and run through the diagnosis room. After an assessment that included age, number of teeth, number of grossly decayed teeth, and status of calculus (tartar for you non-dental kids), they were referred to oral hygiene instruction, scaling, or extractions. Each of us UNC folks rotated through diagnosis, scaling, and extractions. We gave away all the toothbrushes and a significant amount of the toothpaste that we had carried across the ocean.

When I’m doing scaling at the UNC clinic in Chapel Hill, I have access to a bevy of specialized tools for getting to specific surfaces on specific teeth. At the orphanage, I had one randomly assigned scaler and no mirror. We worked with the dental therapists on everything: diagnosis, scaling (I’ll just leave it at this - I saw calculus deposits I had only seen in textbooks in Chapel Hill); and extractions (two of the UNC folks pulled their first teeth today, and I get first dibs tomorrow).

The children were heartbreakingly beautiful and instantly endearing. That’s all I can say about it.

We piled into the bus after all had been treated, and we began the journey back towards Lilongwe. Per the requests of our local passengers, we stopped several times and bought food from vendors lined up along the road. I ate an ear of roasted maize, which was like no corn I’d ever had in the States. Other purchases included enormous bags of peanuts, sweet potatoes, and whole stalks of sugarcane. When I say enormous, I mean it. I mean 40-50 pound bags for $2. I’d never seen anything like it.

The sun set behind us as the bus finally pulled back to the UNC guest house to drop us off. I was exhausted and eager to share the day with you fine folks. Tomorrow, we head to the other hospital in town. If we finish up early, we’re going to run by the curio market to see what’s going on in the world of incredible hand-carved woodcraft.