Bellevue dentist, family bring smiles to Africa

With only the glow of a headlamp, Blake McDonald looked inside the little boy’s mouth.

He did not have any X-rays to assess wether the patient would need a tooth extraction or not. There was no running water or electricity. And worse, Blake, a recent Newport High School graduate, is not even a dentist.

But he would need to be ready to tell his father, Bill, who is a dentist, his observations.

Outside the rundown facility in the small African village of Wakiso where Bill and his son worked, more children lined up in the heat waiting their turn. The majority of them had never even seen a dentist, let alone a “muzungo” (white person).

Bill and several other Reach the Children volunteers had turned the village’s baby delivery facility into a temporary dental clinic using what they had during a recent trip to Africa, where organization volunteers worked on the teeth of nearly 800 children.

Among the volunteers were Bill, his wife, Diane, daughter Jenna and his son Blake. The Bellevue family of eight has all done humanitarian work in Africa for the New York-based nonprofit organization over the years.

It all started six years ago with the eldest child, JeVonne Tanner, now 29. She had been looking for an opportunity to do humanitarian work and found Reach the Children, which facilitates self-reliance in seven African countries dedicated to the well-being of underprivileged children.

“She’d been hitting us all up to go since day one,” Diane said.

Since then, JeVonne has gotten her entire family involved, including younger siblings Brett, Marielle and Heather. Currently the organization’s representatives, JeVonne and Jenna have focused their work mainly on Uganda and Kenya.

This year, Bill and Blake went on their first expedition.

“We didn’t have any guidelines to start with,” Bill said. “I thought there would be an outdoor hut with a dirt floor, but we ended up having nicer facilities than I thought.”

Patient managers, like Blake, would take in six children at a time, visually assess each one and find out their symptoms as best as they could given the language barrier. Using a generator and mobile dental units to power his dental equipment, Bill was able to work on their teeth.

After a while, adults in the village caught on and wanted to be seen, too. They waited for hours, sometimes all day, along with the kids.

Bill and his family couldn’t ignore them. So, they rotated one adult patient for every five children.

“The kids were so trusting,” Diane recalled. “They would just open their mouths and we were all in tears. It was very inspiring to see their trust.”

The conditions of many patient’s teeth were “remarkably sad,” Bill said, noting that the majority of children needed more than one procedure and most needed extractions.

He recalled one woman he worked on who was in her early 20s. He filled two of her teeth and she came back the next day in pain. He told the woman that it should get better in a few weeks, but it may not.

“She said, ‘well, I can’t risk that because you won’t be there,’” he recalled. He ended up pulling her teeth and said though it was “heart breaking,” it made sense to his patient.

He added that he was only able to send his patients home with a gauze pad to bite on. There was no pain medication, no anti-microbial rinses or “things that we use on a routine basis and take for granted and yet they were so grateful for the care,” he said.

During the trip, the volunteers also spent time teaching kids in the village basic hygiene.

“The organization’s purpose is to make children more self-reliant, so it’s not just going and giving donations, it’s going and giving knowledge,” Jenna said.

In addition, in-country representatives tell the organization what the country needs, so they set their own agenda and it’s “not something that’s being pushed on them by an outside group,” Bill said.

Hand washing was one of the most basic skills that volunteers taught children. The biggest challenge with hand washing in the area is that there is no running water, so volunteers purchased more than 60 aluminum tins at local stores and set up washing stations in several schools. The tins were set up where they could collect rain water, and had a spigot for draining. Volunteers also set up bars of soap.

Diane also taught kids that if they don’t have water, they could still wash their hands by rubbing them together using friction.

Children were also taught about feminine hygiene.

Before the McDonald family went to Africa, their Newport ward congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints where Bill is also a bishop, helped them make homemade sanitary pads.

“When girls begin menstruating, they often have to drop out of school because they just use towels and sometimes they don’t have enough to last them throughout the day,” Jenna said.

Diane found a woman in Utah who came up with a way to make the adjustable and reusable pads and church volunteers made more than 100 to give out to the older girls in the villages. When they showed the pads to the girls in the villages, they cheered, Jenna recalled.

“These meant that girls could stay in school,” she said. “This could change a whole young woman’s life and future. So these were gold passing these out.”

Blake said the whole experience was “unbelievable.”

Diane said though it was round-the-clock work, it also was rewarding to help so many children. In sum, the family taught 15,000 kids on their last trip in addition to the dental work.

“The extent of it is always mind boggling to think of how much need there really is and that was my biggest concern going,” Bill said, adding that the experience was close to spiritual.

“The girls have done some wonderful things with humanitarian service and to be with them providing that was really special,” he added.

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