After a long day’s flight from Athens to Amsterdam to Arusha (and getting Margaret on to her Athens to Amsterdam to Seattle to Redmond flights), I awoke Saturday morning to meet wonderful Dr. Alex, a Tanzanian dentist, to visit his clinic on the campus of the Arusha Lutheran Medical Center. Here’s Dr. Alex with the other dentist he works with by their dental chairs.
Dr. Alex showed me his dental chairs, which look like they came from my childhood years where I used to go to Dr. Bjorndahl, who worked without gloves, had hairy knuckles, and worked with horses on his off hours, but you knew it when he had his fingers halfway down your throat. But I digress…
In the Arusha side of Mount Kilimanjaro there have a high level of fluoride in their water. 1.5 parts per million is high fluoride; in Arusha there is 8 parts per million. That means that children are susceptible to a variety of bone deformities in their legs and ankles and also to tooth deformities at an early age that lead to improper tooth development and problems in adult life. Dr. Alex is a dentist, but God put preventative pediatric dental care on his heart, so he’s starting a pilot project to work with a local school with 1,800 kids in grades 1-4; his project that Zion is looking at supporting helps to teach teachers to provide dental education to their students. Currently he’s working with just grade 1 at the school, with 800 kids in that grade. Colgate donated dental packs (tooth brushes, tooth paste, and floss) to the 800 kids, and he’s looking at growing the program to include more students and more schools as this project grows. Zion is on the ground floor of supporting this project, so it’s very exciting.
Oh, and by the way, the second and third pictures are their dental lab. Oh, and also, the pictures of the X-Ray machines are the old films; they’re not digital, so they have to look at the films. And one of the machines was delivered years ago, second-hand, with missing parts, so it doesn’t work, but they keep it there just for posterity.
To repair a cavity costs about $15; a root canal is $45. Most Tanzanians can’t afford that, so they go without much dental care at all. This can be devastating for them, and especially difficult for the children. That’s what we hope to help out with at Zion. 85% of people here don’t have insurance at all, and even the small cost of dental care is out of the reach of most Tanzanians.
Then it was on to the Arusha Lutheran Medical Center, a private hospital which is one of the best in Tanzania. The Lutheran hospital system here is similar to the Lutheran hospital systems in the U.S. of 100 years ago where good Lutheran people started hospitals and social service agencies. They pay a very high tax, which caused the hospital to come close to closing last year because they couldn’t afford the taxes. Tanzania is a democratic country, but they elected a guy recently who put many detractors in jail, and it’s coming close to a dictatorship, which is very unfortunate.
The rest of the pictures are from around town, including one of a woman sweeping her sidewalk.
And here is Dr. Alex and me after the morning tour. He’s a wonderful, gracious person and it is going to be very rewarding working with his project!
Dr. Alex’ greeting to the people of Zion
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