Oral hygiene is the last thing I expected to find in this camp. Who has
the energy to brush their teeth after every meal? Not to talk about flossing.
Anyone complaining about tooth ache, and there are a lot of them, gets the
wonder drug, paracetamol. 2 pills and that's it.
And then came the magician. Dr. Robert Garcia Lopez.
A real sweet man, full of life. Treats everyone with dedication, compassion,
gentleness, calmness, and fixes everybody's smiles. A real miracle maker in the
most improvised dental clinic I have ever seen.
He has a little motor, hidden away in the toilet room since it's so
noisy. Only a long electrical cord dangles into the clinic and connects to a
drill. A small
water pump connected to a tube to suck the saliva. It doesn't really work very
well, so every few minutes the patients need to spit into a plastic cup they
hold in their hands.
Usual dentist tools. Anesthetics, syringes, needles. Everything is
sterilized every day at home in a metal contained with Formaldehyde. It's disinfected
after 6 hours, and sterilized after 24, or so the manufacturer claims.
There's no special dentist chair. Only a clinic bed. The patient's head lies
back on the head-rest, and Robert is forced to work while standing up, leaning
over to the patient. By the end of every day, his back is finished. Alex, our translator
to Arabic, was a physiotherapist in Iraq, so he starches up Robert, just to
keep him standing.
For light, he is using a small flashlight on his head, which needs batteries
change every other day, and a desk lamp, held by our Iranian translator, Mahmud,
who is becoming an experienced dentist-assistant.
Treatments are surprisingly divers. Nothing complicated like a root
canal or implants, and off course no cosmetic treatments like teeth alignment
or replacing silver fillings, but the basics are there. Antibiotics for
infections, fillings, cleaning, pulling teeth and releasing a locked tooth.
An emergency treatment for a little boy, who played with a metal
instrument, which was stuck on his upper gum.
A girl with a strange front tooth. The tooth has a large hole, from
front to back, that by miracle missed the root completely, so it doesn't hurt. But
she hasn't smiled in two years. Constantly embarrassed and barely opens her
mouth. I have no idea how, but Robert
was able to close the hole completely. Now she is smiling from ear to ear.
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