Thursday 2 October 2014

Dental Week - All people smile in the same language



With the great help of Odontologos Sin Fronteras/ Dentist Without Borders, we had the opportunity to provide free dental aid to the community of Flora Tristan from the 15th until the 20th of September.

Dentist Without Borders is an organization with a multidisciplinary team of oral health professionals. They are providing social projects, tools and consulting services, as well as giving advice to companies, institutions, municipalities and regional governments in order to improve dental health and the quality of life of citizens around the world. 

Photos by Robert Els
During the dental week our classrooms were turned into a dental practise and with the help of Dentists Without Borders we were able to provide 329 treatments during 240 dental sessions. Almost 45% of the treatments were dental restorations and 17% were extractions. While the afternoons from Monday to Friday were used to provide treatment to our students and their family, on Saturday we opened up the free treatment to whole community of Flora Tristan as well. It was so exciting to see so many children and their families benefit from these dental outreaches, which was only made possible through the help of the 22 volunteer dentists from Dentist Without Borders.
Photo by Robert Els
The myth that dentists are scary were not confirmed by our children. The wonderful dentists just knew how to break the ice with the kids.

Photo by Robert Els
This little girl for example didn`t show any fear before or during the treatment. We are so proud of our students for being so brave and really excited to see the new, healthy smiles on their faces.
These are just some of the wonderful dentists who volunteered their time to help our community

We want to give a big thank you to all the volunteer dentists, coordinators and other participants for helping implement this extremely important project. And to keep our students` teeth healthy we implemented a daily teeth brushing routine into all of our classes as well.

 - Written by Charlette Voss