The troops have descended.  I woke up and headed down to the pair of hotels that are housing our mob.  One one side of the street is a group of twelve people from UC Berkley, UCSF, UConn and UP in Cambodia.  The group includes three dentists, a pediatrician, and a gaggle of dental and undergrad students.  Across the road is almost our entire JOHC field staff: 6 technicians, 5 clinic assistants, and 5 team leaders covering nine villages.  I stopped in both hotels to make sure breakfast was happening and then went down to our training hall about 10 minutes before we were scheduled to start.  Naturally, I found that the hotel staff had just begun to clean the hall, and that this process involved spraying copious amounts of air freshner in to a room with large, closed windows.  I requested a halt to the air fresher and opened the windows, which looked pleasantly out over the lake.

It was crazy watching everyone filter in to the training hall.  I know all our technicians pretty well, but the team leaders and clinic assistants I don’t see often besides in photos.  I’m only in Nepal for 4-8 weeks at a time and there’s no way to get to every site during every visit, so sometimes I won’t see field teams for over a year.  And the technicians collaborate with each other at big school programs, but the rest of the field teams don’t get many chances to see each other after their initial training, and even then, usually only in the cohorts they started with.  Then, on the other side of the equation, I’ve spent a lot of time on email and skype with all the people from the universities, but the only person I’d met in person Dr. Keri from UConn.  Now here was everybody, all together, in a very air-freshened room, sitting down in actual chairs.

We immediately encountered a projector obstacle.  Namely, the projector was not working.  Dr. Karen got everyone occupied with an introductory activity while I frantically tried to deal with the projector, which eventually led to a hotel guy running down the street with admirable good-will (he might have been fleeing from the crazy American going WHY? WHY ISNT IT WORKING WHYYYYY?) to have someone swap out a cable, while 40 people were distracted on a scavenger hunt looking for other people who had never had a cavity or who inappropriately eat sweets for breakfast.

The projector obstacle went through a number of other iterations that I’ll skip; eventually, it worked.  Aamod and I gave a presentation on our JOHC model and human-rights health care for the visiting research teams.  It was really fun to see our field staff get excited when photos of their clinics or programs came up on the screen.  Then Madhurima and Karen presented on the relationship between nutrition and oral health, which was super interesting and will make great material for our teams to incorporate in to their school education programs.

After lunch we split in to two groups.  Our team leaders went with Madhurima and Dr. Karen to learn how to conduct surveys tomorrow.  I am pretty sure from the one photo I took and the minute I spent watching that this involved a lot of everyone trying to figure out what everyone else was saying, which I’m sure will work out just fine.  They’ll be assisting the UCal group with a study of oral health practices and nutrition, and we set up some of the screenings in Puranchaur where we operate, and then in one of our non-working areas, Hansapur, to see if there are any differences between these two areas in oral health knowledge or practices.

While that was going on, our technicians and clinic assistants had an amazing training with Dr. Keri, a pediatric dentist at UConn, and Dr. Bethy from New Zealand, who is doing her PhD in Cambodia.  They had an in-depth orientation on pain diagnosis, and then learned techniques for fluoride varnish and silver diamine fluoride, a substance which is used to arrest carries with no invasive techniques or anesthetic.  During the upcoming screenings this week, our technicians will begin using these techniques under supervision, in addition to the fillings and extractions they already do.

So while this was all happening, we encountered a fleece jacket situation.  I realize you feel that there are many reasons to believe we had overcome all components of the fleece jacket situation.  I understand how you feel.  I really do.

But by late afternoon, we still had no jackets.  Also, obviously, there was a random shutdown of travel in the middle of the day in one part of the city, so the Man In Charge of the Fleece Jackets couldn’t get to his printing factory.  Because, these things happen.  They really do.

Therefore, I kept leaving the pain diagnosis training to make calls about fleece jackets.  Finally Muna looked at me and declared, “We will get the fleece jackets.”

Me: “But–”

Muna: “Go upstairs.”

Me: “By–”

Muna: “We will get them.”

Oh Muna, bless your heart.  Back to pain diagnosis.

Muna and Gaurab got the jackets, using the magic and unknown powers of being not me.

Five PM.  Photo op!  Selfies.  Also staff hug.  We survived training day!