Today our mission team started the dental clinic portion of our trip. The small rural hospital here in Quimistan gives us two rooms in the hospital for seeing dental patients. After breakfast, the team arrived at the dental clinic at 8:00am where we found children and some parents from the remote mountain village of Tierra Amarilla already there. They had come down from their village over an hour drive away via extremely poor, steep roads, in the open back of a small truck. They had wonderful smiles on their faces and were happy to see us. There were also several Agape Promise students from the local area awaiting treatment by the dentists.
Tommy was amused this morning when he asked the first 2 patients he met how old they were, in Spanish (Cuantos años tienes?) and separately they both responded, “Eleven”, in English. 😁 The kids are so much fun, and the language barrier isn’t really much of one. When not being worked on, they had fun with balloons, coloring books, balls, and other diversions.
After prepping the dental equipment, the 4 dentists started the treatments on the children. The age of the children seen ranged from a 6-year old boy up to high school students. On many of these children there were multiple problems that needed to be treated requiring an extended time to complete the treatment. A dental cleaning was also provided for each of the children. Although we have no trained dental assistants on the mission team, team members from age 13 to 74 assisted the dentists.
During the day, the dentists did have some problems with the portable dental equipment, but worked around these issues to treat the children. Please pray that these machines will continue to operate well enough for us to complete our work.
The total children treated today was 25. Of these, 9 children were from Tierra Amarilla mountain village, 15 were Agape Promise students, and one was a small child from Quimistan. The dentists also treated 2 adults including Dr. Tino (the doctor that assists the Honduras Agape Foundation by making medical visits to the various mountain villages for our foundation), and Daniel (the Spanish-English translator that assists all our HAF mission teams).
In summary, it was a wonderful first day of dental treatments for our mission team. God was certainly with us today! A few samples of our day are in the following photos:
Honduras Agape 