Why We Go
The need for dental care in underserved communities, both globally and locally, is enormous and persistent. In the United States we take for granted that if a tooth hurts badly enough, there is somewhere to go. A dental office, an urgent care, an emergency room. The path to getting out of pain may be financially difficult but it exists.
In the communities we visit in the Dominican Republic, that path is significantly less clear. Access to professional dental care is limited. The infrastructure for regular preventive care is minimal. Patients arrive with problems that have been accumulating for years… infections that have spread, teeth that have broken down, pain that has become a constant rather than an event.
We cannot solve that systemic problem in a week. What we can do is provide real, skilled, professional care to the patients in front of us on the days we are there, and we can bring our whole team into that experience in a way that changes how they think about the work they do every day.
That second part, what it does to the team, is something we did not fully anticipate before the first trip and now consider one of the most important reasons we keep going.
