Paul, Ute and Nikki's Blog: Dental Class

It’s about 3 or 4AM, gotta love jet lag. I think the roosters here are in a different time zone, they won’t shut up! Something big and heavy just scurried across the corrugated metal roof of our hut. I stepped outside and the brilliance of the stars is breath-taking. No moon, no ambient light, just stars piercing the deep, dark sky, stars like I haven’t seen before.

Yesterday was quite a day. In the morning, Priscilla had some water boiled for us so we could wash our hair - yeah, what a novelty. First thing in the morning Monique prepared her lesson on dental hygiene. She is a dentist assistant and brought with her 300 toothbrushes of various sizes, dental floss, lots of rubber gloves, and some tools to look into the mouths of the children. When we arrived at the school, the grade 8’s were scrubbing their desks out in the morning sun. They are to write their exams over the next 3 days, and they cannot write the exam on a desk with any markings on it. So they were using sand and water to scrub it clean (like sandpaper), and shards of glass to scrape the top. The younger kids packed a classroom for the dental program, and when there was absolutely no space left, the door was closed, but kids fought for places at the windows, pressing their little faces against the glass to catch a glimpse of what was going on. Not sure if they knew we were going to repeat the class for them later. Monique did some theory, explaining about the tooth and mouth, and we did a short skit to show how cavities are formed. Then looking into their mouths, she found most teeth were in pretty good shape, despite lack of brushing and proper cleaning tools like toothbrushes. Apparently, these kids don’t have access to candies and things that rot your teeth, and this shows that our biggest dental problems, cavities, are self-imposed. Talking with the teachers, they tell me that when kids have toothaches, they go to the hospital if their family can afford it to have the tooth pulled. Costs about $2 per tooth. They just pull it, there are no fillings or anything like that. If the child can’t afford it and the pain gets too bad, there are a few cases where the kid pulled out their own tooth. No, not a baby tooth, a real tooth.. Um … OK, let that digest for a moment.

The children had fun brushing and flossing their teeth. Monique taught them to brush with salt water, as they wouldn’t be able to afford toothpaste (even if they could find it) once we leave. Instead of throwing out the garbage floss afterwards, I noticed many of the kids sucking on the floss hours later, as I think they never tasted the mint before and liked it. Very cute.

At one point the kids ran to the base of a tree in a frenzy. They knelt down, crowding the base of the tree. I took a closer look to see what they were doing, and found that the base of the tree was covered with a specific flying bug, and the kids were racing to catch the bugs and pop them into their mouths like popcorn. What an amazing site! One of the teachers told me that these bugs come out of the tree after a heavy rain, and the kids love to eat them as they taste good. Ah…OK. Eating bugs. Hmmm. Who would eat a bug? Actually, it was slightly sweet, though the wings took some chewing. Hey, don’t judge. When in Rome…

Alfred, the school’s second-in-command and Priscilla’s son, took me aside to show me what they had done with the money we gave them last year on our trip for a water pump. There is a stream down the valley where the children must go to fetch water and wash their clothes. They have a rain catchment system where the eaves troughs on a roof drain into a big cement bowl to hold the water for use, during the rainy season twice a year. But for 8 months of the year, the stream is the only source. They had a bore-hole well but it was dry. They laid a long pipe from the stream to the catchment, but had no money for a pump. So last time we were here we bought the pump, but heard nothing about it since. Perhaps the money was needed for food instead. Anyway, Alfred explained that the pump was not strong enough to pump water from the stream so far away, so they re-opened the bore-hole well, dug it deeper to get to the water table, and put the pump on the well. So for 4 months of the year when the water table is high enough, they can use the well. I cannot describe the shivers that went down my spine when he flipped a switch and water gushed out of the well’s water spout. It was just amazing - a few hundred dollars for a pump, but this has transformed their lives for a few months of the year; more time for the kids to learn in school because they don’t have to carry water from the stream or carry their clothes down there to wash them. I realized that it is not water coming out of that spout, it is time. And it’s just a little pump, that’s all. Really puts things in perspective.

That afternoon Scott, Matias and I went with Alfred to Kisumu to pick up some supplies and to book the last part of our trip for next week. Kisumu is a crowded, vibrant, dusty city where a car spends more time dodging things than driving straight - dodging people walking, bicycles with boxes stacked 10 feet high, donkeys, goats, and other cars and smoke-spewing, crowded Matatus (beat-up vans with windows) trying to themselves dodge things, and coming straight at you in the process.

Meanwhile, the others stayed back at the school and played with the children. Nikki must have played 3 hours of soccer on their field of hard red clay, grass and mud. We brought them a few soccer balls, and it seemed to be quite a novelty. They are used to playing with a ball made of scrumpled plastic bags, tied in a sphere with twine. So on a real ball, some of them had great soccer skills. She seemed to have had fun. All the mzungas (white people) had to make speeches at their flag-lowering ceremony when school was out, mostly revolving around encouragement for the Standard 8 class (grade 8’s) who were to write their provincial exams the following few days.

That evening before dinner we presented Priscilla with a cheque for the funds we had raised. Through our conversations with she and Alfred, it became evident that along with the money, we thought we should provide some guidance as to how we thought the money should be spent, with the understanding that they were the experts, but hopefully we could give them an objective view. We wanted to make sure the money wasn’t ’dead aid’, to just solve an immediate problem and be gone after it was spent. The promise to the people who donated was to provide a ’sustainable lunch program’, and we wanted to be true to that. So we divided the ’Lunch For Life’ money up between paying for lunches on the specific days people requested, as well as buying a milking cow and buying 400 chickens and their feed, to produce eggs. Other funds we raised were for toilets in the dorms (as kids are afraid to go outside to use the outhouse at night, so they must use their wash basin, and then use it for washing in the morning…) and a few repairs on the cement water catchment. Priscilla was quite happy with the funds and the prioritization.

I think the sun is starting to come up, the birds are awake now, with loud, beautiful songs. We have a long day of teaching ahead of us.