September 28 outreach!

At last the day came to help pull teeth and heal people. My friends and I helped out in a medical-dental mission I co-organized at the biggest barangay in the Philippines. It was located at the gym near AMPAPP (Ang Muling Pagkabuhay ng Ating Panginoon Parish). More than a hundred fifty aching biters/snappers were pulled out by the team headed by Doc Aga, the Executive Secretary of the Philippine Dental Association. They were helped by friend DMD Noemi and assisted by registered nurses and other volunteers in the quick two-hour operation. It was like a production line of first anesthetizing a group of people, and then the systematic extraction. I was surprised that within twenty minutes of settling down, the first tooth was already done! And three immediately after!


More texts and the first pictures to come later. Hang in there.

And..here they are! This was the day that the dentists were on center stage! Literally..they were on the stage. The doctors were below the stage.



Doc Dzen and Nurse Marose writing the common prescription for dental patients. Pages of a tickler notebook were used in place of prescription pads. Ballpens used were lent by volunteers. I'm proud to say that they were returned to their rightful owners after use! There was no need to put a sticker with a label "Stolen from...".





Here is Doc Noe applying anesthesia to the patient patient. The anesthesia takes effect within 5 minutes, when injected on the lower jaw, faster when on the upper jaw.








The Sanitize team was in charge of disinfecting the dental instruments used. Three basins with the chemicals were the wash basins for these three "gypsy girls". The Cotton team supplied the cotton that were needed to stop bleeding. Initially I thought assistants were needed to maneuver the patients' heads but there was no need for that.







Patients patiently waiting for their turn. The dental patients were half the number of the medical patients. More than three hundred were given check-ups by only three doctors. Make that "medical" doctors. My dentist friend Glenda said that she was also a doctor. Dentist to be specific.



Photo of the gym as we left for the tour of the bukid.


I asked Ate Lydia to tour me around their place. She was the one from AMPAPP's Social Service department who wrote me a letter requesting for a medical-dentals. I wanted to see how else I can help them out by survevying their area. Volunteer Krysta (my loyal WYD buddy!) accompanied me. Our "tour guides" were Inang Buen and Ate Jessica plus her husband and youngest daughter Bebe. She has a name but I forget now what. Let's call her as her mother calls her.

This is Bebe.
They call it the bukid since it was like that, and mostly the relief from AMPAPP goes to that place since it was the poorest of all the Kapatiran places. The Kapatiran is the local organization of a certain area. We were with Inang Buen, the head of Kapatiran Siete. The bukid was precisely their area.