INTER VIEW
restore teeth, however, in the rural outreach clinics where we work, the locals can’t afford toothpaste or a toothbrush. As a result, we now carry out pain clinics to extract teeth. To give readers an idea of just how busy we were this year, we extracted 1,401 teeth on more than 800 patients. All this is done in tropical heat with no electricity and often no running water.
Typical rural clinic - no electricity
Later in the year we will separate
from the Raven Trust to become our own charity. We will continue to work alongside them and the friendships and bonds we have made with them will never be broken. there are many reasons why it will be to our benefit to separate. One is that Smileawi will be a purely humanitarian organisation with no religious foundation unlike the Raven Trust. Tis makes sense to us in multicultural Scotland.
When was the first trip you took out to Malawi with the charity? Our first trip was in September 2012, we went out for four weeks and visited three sites, all mission hospitals. We went to Ekwendeni, Livingstonia and Embangweni. We carried out very little dental work on this visit. We recorded what equipment each of the hospitals had in their dental units, what materials, what the workforce was, what training was required and we checked to see if the equipment worked.
“OUR EXPERIENCE ON THAT FIRST TRIP WAS LIFE CHANGING”
What was your reaction? Our experience on that first trip was life changing. We were overwhelmed by the poverty. Yet, in spite of the poverty, people were happy. We were astonished to find that in the north of Malawi, a population of up to four and a half million people was being served by just 24 dental therapists, none of whom have good working equip- ment, and who often run out of basic materials like local anaesthetic and sometimes don’t get paid by the various organisations for whom they work. Over the time since our first
visit we have evolved things. We no longer carry out ART restorations. It seems like a wonderful idea to
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What impact has the charity had in Malawi? Te charity has helped thousands of patients in pain over the past four years. We have also paid for a baby called Trust, born with a cleft lip, palate and a missing eye to be seen regularly by a South African specialist who visits Lilongwe the capital of Malawi. We now support all of the dental therapists in the north of Malawi and arrange for local anaesthetic to be shipped out to them. We have also sent out good quality donated equipment and high quality dental materials. We have now taken our first team of volunteers and I thank them for making that trip so much fun.
What are your hopes and plans for the future? We feel ready to expand, we would like to take out more teams, perhaps developing some of the volunteers as team leaders so that we don’t always have to be present. We would also like to encourage
other dental professionals in Scotland to fundraise for us. Maybe your next 10k or parachute jump could be for Smileawi. We hope to continue supporting the therapists in the north but would eventually like to extend that support to therapists in the south and central regions too. We also like the idea of a mobile
dental surgery which could be used to get to even more remote locations. We have already made arrangements to increase the number of remote rural sites we will visit in 2016.
SCO TTISH DENT AL
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