Harvest of Hope School

Today we visited the Harvest of Hope school on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. This is a Christian NGO that receives funding from Australia. 

Though we anticipated a problem with the organizers of today's work, they turned out to be terrific. We worked closely with them to explain the rationale of which teeth had to be extracted. Sadly, and fortunately, many of the first children we examined this morning had visible abscesses and the need for extracting these teeth was painfully obvious. And the translators were instrumental in helping the children receive appropriate treatment. 

What we discovered today, was when a community has access to year round dental care, they will only utilize it for emergency situations. And that should come as no surprise, many in the US do the same thing. So today, much of our work was overcoming this mentality. The children will never know the pain that we were able to avert with today's timely dental care. 

Each day we are seeing more patients and doing more procedures. Our numbers today were 217 patients seen, 175 fluoride varnishes, 80 extractions of baby teeth and 20 extractions of permanent teeth. While the early morning patients were local students, later in the day we saw patients from the countryside. The children were "trucked" in to us from some 60 km away. 

Tomorrow we visit Arun's village. I have heard of this place for the past four years, but have always been here for the second week of the trip. Arun works at our hotel and has maintained a strong connection to his distant village. Sheri, one of our long time volunteers has teamed with Arun to provide regular fluoride treatments and solar lights to help students do their homework. 

The work is hard, but it is cooler than last year and each day brings an unexpected adventure. 

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