Today I made my first visit to our clinic in Puranchaur, which launched a year ago in winter 2015. We rode motorbikes – I hopped on one with our program director Aamod, and I stuck my friend Freeman on the back of the other bike with our field officer Gaurab. Freeman lived in rural Afghanistan for two years and his training involved things like “how to drive through a blockade,” so I figured it would be okay.

FYI, re: riding on the back of a motorbike:

1. Paved road –> plus side: fast / minus side: scary
2. Rutted dirt road –> plus side: good workout, bracing / minus side: rather sore bum, dust
3. Previously paved road that has deteriorated and broken up in to a patchy mess with some dirt packed around in it –> plus side: there’s a road, so you’re not walking / minus side: everything else

The way to Puranchaur comes in at a solid #3 for a vigorous 64 minute joy ride.

Fortunately, we were greeted at Puranchaur by the sight of a very well-built Health Post. All of our clinics are in buildings provided by the community, and where possible it is ideal if the building can be in or next to the existing government Health Post. But Health Posts aren’t usually this nice.

It was immediately clear that we’ve received good local support at this stage of the game in Puranchaur. There was a lively crowd of patients waiting on the balcony, and this clinic is run by one of our more experienced technicians, Megnath.

See for yourself:

We went through our supervision checklist, which includes a rigorous infection control protocol that I wrote myself by talking with dentists and rural trainers, then making modifications based on my own knowledge of the environment, because I realized that none of the existing guidelines were really adapted for these conditions. Amazingly, the only existing protocols I could get my hands on were for dental hospitals with electricity and technology – think, UV disinfection – or, alternatively, unwritten procedures used in temporary dental camps, which presume very high patient volume and the lack of any stable infrastructure. Can you believe that I could not locate a single infection control protocol designed for a permanent rural dental clinic in Nepal? 80% of Nepal’s population and nearly all the government Health Posts operate in rural conditions!

Which is why now I know more than I ever planned to about gloving and re-gloving, positioning of safety boxes, and timing of Virex disinfection, among other topics.

Our rewarding visit to Puranchaur has me thinking more and more about the larger idea of our project. It’s great when we’re able to establish these services and it sure is gratifying to come all the way here, after hours and hours of sitting at a desk, meetings on Skype, researching oral health data, giving talks and raising money, and see patients coming in to a clinic in Puranchaur on a Wednesday afternoon. It’s also awesome to me that none of these people associate their clinic with me or my slideshows or any kind of charity, which is not what these services are intended to be. All that is good stuff.

On a bad day it seems like it just isn’t enough. There are so many problems here. A toothache is definitely one of the worst things in the world if it is in your mouth…but it’s not as bad as child trafficking. These clinics don’t solve problems of violence or lack of basic security or opportunity. Sometimes it seems like a lot of effort to still end up in a world that has those problems anyway.

But one thing I think we’re isolating bit by bit has to do with recouping lost opportunities for self-determination. Something our little project does increasingly well that I don’t see very often in this sector is to understand and respect the present capacities of individual people and the communities where we work on all levels. That means letting go of the UV disinfection, but it also means having a proper replacement and monitoring it. It means making services accessible, but then holding people accountable for accessing them by choice, rather than spoon feeding and disempowering everyone for our own gratification. It means that explaining to an old lady that she will not be blind if we pull her tooth out, and making the service psychologically available, is just as important as having a dental clinic that’s physically available.

This is hard to do. It requires an unreasonable amount of patience and the willingness to constantly sort out where to impose control and where to throw everything you think is correct out the window. Inevitably, there are moments where it seems like you’re dong everything wrong and it’s all for nothing.  At some level, I think it only works if you find people as interesting and challenging and curious as the problem you are trying to address.

That’s what has me wondering what we’re really getting at here. I’ve always felt like, even with the visible services this dental project provides, for me as a person, it’s an exercise in something else I haven’t understood yet. Maybe this is just a story I tell myself after a good day, but we would live in and more dignified and peaceful world if we cared as much about actual people as we do about ideas of people.

Today, one old lady with a toothache spent a good bit of time explaining how she’d treated it by putting tobacco in there.  The tobacco helped. Megnath couldn’t extract her tooth because she had complicating heart issues that require referral to a hospital – but he had a nice long conversation with her about the tobacco, anyway.

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