Dental Missions in the land of Machu Picchu!

Mark Just Gentle Care Missions, a dental team from Anchorage, Alaska, served with CFCI Peru on October 16-22 this year.

Dr. Just has been going on dental missions since 2008. Since then he and his team have provided care in the Philippines, Honduras, Guyana and this year, the team decided to travel to Peru with CFCI.

In Rimac, Peru, the team helped five schools, the local police office, and a public market place that was open to all of the locals. As a group they also felt the need to provide care, as a thank you, to the church that was hosting them.

In the schools they encountered many children whose mouths were in the worst shape. They saw six-year-old kids that needed all their baby teeth removed. They saw teenagers with many adult teeth that already needed extractions. It became apparent that the lack of dental health education, as well as the lack of finances, is a major issue in Rimac. While the team wanted to extract as many teeth as they could to get the kids out of pain, they were told that they were not allowed to remove teeth without permission from the children's parents. This put them in a tough spot so, instead they did a few fillings and made sure that all the children received a cleaning and education on how to properly brush and floss.

At the market, police station, and church the majority of the adults’ mouths were in similar condition to the children that they saw in the schools. Surprisingly, the team came across many who did not want to extract their teeth, though many were broken at the gum line and abscessed. These teeth definitely needed extractions and could not be saved, but they wanted the team to ‘fix’ them instead. Nevertheless, the team did what they could to give them the most proper care and most importantly… dental health education!

The team found that the people of Peru are very different from what North Americans are used to, they are high spirited, positive, hard working and built tough, but EXTREMELY kind hearted people. 

A team member reports, "It has only been two weeks since we have been back and we miss the Peruvians DEARLY!!! We could not have asked for a more successful mission and this is ALL thanks to Andres, his son Gabriel, our host family (the Vega family), and all who helped with this mission. They were the absolute best, they catered to our needs, jumped right on tasks that needed attending to, made sure that the we were ALWAYS safe and comfortable, even when we ventured out to Machu Picchu! It seems to be that they gave us no other choice, but to come back to Peru." 

If you'd like information about serving in Peru please contact angieb@cfci.org.