For these past two months Mellony and I have been in PNG, as part of our team for the school dental program. This program brings much needed dental services to students in Port Moresby, alongside oral health and nutrition education.
While this was Mellony’s fourth time working as part of the program, it was my first time to be part of one of these outreaches and it was a confronting experience.
While I knew dental care can be a big need for a lot of people in PNG, I didn’t expect to see the level of decay and oral hygiene issues in children of such a young age. Many of our youngest students, starting at just five years of age, needed multiple extractions and fillings and the older children often already had decay in many of their permanent teeth. Nearly half of the children we completed an oral health assessment for reported having some kind of tooth pain.
I couldn’t help thinking that if I had grown up in PNG I’d likely have been in the same situation as many of the students we were seeing. As a kid I didn’t take good care of my teeth and liked sweets but had more access to dental care growing up in England than the kids we were seeing.
Working as a DA and in our sterilisation area
While Mellony was co-leading the clinical team, I was working in our sterilisation area and working chair side dental assisting. One of the students that came through our chair who was quite memorable was a grade 5 student who needed work on 11 of his teeth; his front teeth were mostly black and misshapen from decay, and his molars had large holes in them, some looking more like craters than teeth.
We worked on this student’s teeth for nearly two hours. As the dental assistant I was responsible for handling and preparing various instruments and filling material for the dentist (most of which I now know the names of!), and being quick on the suction. We cleaned and recreated his front teeth, restored the molars that we were able to and extracted those which were too badly decayed to be saved. At the end we handed him a mirror to show him his recreated front teeth, and with a very numb mouth full of gauze he gave a relieved ‘thank you’.
Over the six weeks we were able to do treatment for about 350 students, completing an average of over 5 procedures per child! In this figure there were a number of students we were able to help restore smiles for and a lot of kids we were able to do work to relieve pain.
A before-and-after of some restorations done to a young girl’s anterior teeth to help restore her smile! And a flossing lesson at the end to help her take care of them
Balloon city in the trailer! Our theory was that balloons would help make the trailer (and us) less scary and it did work!
Alongside our clinical team, our team doing oral health education went classroom to classroom providing oral health education to over 1,900 students. During the final week of the program one of our Papua New Guinean volunteers who was part of the team shared how impactful he had found the teachings himself, and shared how he didn’t have these kind of teachings while he was at school and how much of a need he saw for giving this information to the next generation.
An oral health education session underway in a classroom
Now that we’re finished with outreach,we’re looking at what’s coming up next and it’s exciting. While we’ve had our heads down focussing on all things dental, things have continued to progress in other areas of the ministry – a big one being our ship getting two new generators installed!
We’re heading back to Australia this week for a few weeks of leave (we have a family wedding to celebrate, nieces and a new nephew to see, a car to buy and a road trip to enjoy!) but will be back up in less than a month to sail back out with her to Western Province for another quarter of outreach. I’ll be back to working in the lab and we’ll be back in primary health care.
Join our WhatsApp group!
Would you like to hear from us a little more frequently? David and I have just started a WhatsApp group where we’ll aim to provide more frequently, small, real-time updates and prayer requests, aiming to share something brief every few weeks. We’ll start posting in October. If you like to join our group you can click this link; we’d love to have you there!
(We’ve set up the group so that only David or I are able to post messages. Members will still be able to react to messages (and contact us separately if you’d like to chat!) but you won’t have to worry about a flood of messages from the group )
Thank you for your continuing support!
