First day of clinic

Today was our first day of clinic and it was very successful!

The hotel we are staying at has been very comfortable and the food is great! We started the day off with breakfast at the hotel and then headed over to the mission to continue setting up. After a lot of work yesterday and this morning we were able to get five chairs running with hand pieces, water and suction! Having suction at each of the chairs is a huge help, Miguel was able to build a vacuum system for our trips in June, thanks again for doing that!

For the first day, we saw 22 patients and completed 26 extractions and 24 fillings. It was a very busy day and we we are still working on finding all our supplies, but overall we were very happy with how it went. The second years - Mark and Denise - got to give their first injections and even got in on some of the fillings and extractions. It was exciting for them to see their first patients.

In the afternoon we saw mostly the girls from the school at the mission. The mission runs a girls school which brings in girls from the surrounding villages to provide them with an education. They come from very poor villages and many of the girls needed a lot of dental work. We had to do a lot of extractions, which is sad to have to do at such a young age.  We wish that we had dental hygienists at the mission so we could give OHI and really teach them preventative dentistry.  The community room/classrom would be a good place for that.

Overall it was a very successful day and we are all very tired from a long day of hard work. We are off to play some cards before bed and will post more updates and pictures soon!  Tomorrow we will be starting our day at 6:30am, with the goal of 30 patients!


Highlights:
Eskimo icecream closes at 8pm on Mondays-- so we missed it tonight!
Ryan gets blood/goo/poopystuff from the suction waste spilled onto his shoes :(