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Filling big holes
Filling big holes
Tennessee couple offers low-cost dentistry to Mayan poor
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A patient at Don and Peg Orth's dental clinic gets treated with an ultraviolet light gun that cures wet cement.
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By Called and Sent Staff PHOTOS
EL REJÓN, Guatemala – When Don Orth looks around his makeshift dental clinic in this mountain village, he can find plenty of reasons to hang up his drill and go home.
Flies harangue him incessantly. The dim light turns routine molar extractions into cave explorations in miniature. Between sacks of corn and furniture, free space in this borrowed one-room house is minimal. Equipment set-up robs him of at least an hour of work time every day.
Despite all of that, Don and his wife, Peggy, a retired registered nurse, have carried on a working retirement in Latin America six months a year for most of the past decade. They spend the other six months at their modest home in the foothills of eastern Tennessee.
Watching Don and Peggy comfort a woman in obvious duress after an extraction, it’s easy to see why they keep coming back.
“I feel very strongly about helping poor people, especially the Mayans,” says Don, 66, who worked for the Veterans Administration and in private practice. “I love the Mayan people very much. They are the poorest of the poor and very discriminated against, and they don’t have access to medical and dental facilities.”
Don and Peggy first noticed the need for dental work in the developing world during a trip to the Philippines with another ministry more 10 years ago. When the Orths returned home, a friend donated parts for the portable dental unit that they still use, and Don field-tested it for the first time during a trip to Haiti in May 2000.
Trips to Mexico followed, then Honduras. When Peggy retired from nursing in 2003, she started traveling with Don.
“It’s not about doing dentistry per se,” Peggy says. “What keeps us going is the people and the need. We are determined that this not be a humanitarian effort, but that it be to show the love of Jesus to people we work with.”
More than three-fourths (76 percent) of Guatemala’s 6.5 million indigenous Mayan people live in poverty, according to a 2003 World Bank report. Guatemala also ranks near the bottom for infant mortality, maternal mortality, life expectancy and malnutrition, the report says.
The Orths work independently, paying their own way, free to move among different ministries that request their help. Today they are conducting a low-cost clinic with Hector Flores of Mission Impact, a mission agency based in the nearby city of Antigua. The help is mutual -- Hector helps Don and Peggy with their Spanish, and the Orths attract people who can hear the Gospel from Hector.
“We’re very much a people magnet,” Don says. “We’ve come to the point where we don’t put up signs anymore, because so many people come.”
Hector has made appointments to keep order, but the line in front of the one-room concrete house donated for today’s clinic is much longer than the two dozen or so patients Don has time to see.
The raw demand may press Don to keep the line moving, but he doesn’t let patients know it. He talks to them as he works, explaining to them what is happening in his better-than-middling Spanish.
“Poco presión, poco presión – esta bien (a little pressure, a little pressure, it’s OK),” he tells one woman. The woman confides that she’s nervous, and Don whispers back that he’s really nervous, too. They share the laugh that Don was looking for.
“It kind of breaks the tension,” he says.
He gives the woman two injections of Novocain. The small air compressor that powers the instruments growls to life as Peggy suctions out the woman’s mouth. Don does one of the many extractions that he will perform today.
“The light I have around my head doesn’t illuminate very well, and it’s very hard to see into the patient’s mouth,” he says. “So when you’re doing extractions, it’s very, very difficult. And were working without X-rays. I can’t carry an X-ray machine, so we’re working partially blind.”
Still, the patients come. And still, he and Peggy laugh with them and give them prescriptions for medicine. Patients pay five quetzales (about 65 cents) for their appointments, with Mission Impact getting it all for its work.
Another woman, waiting to get in, says one dentist in the nearby city of Sumpango charges 15 quetzales, commonly called Qs, which was OK. However, other dentists in Antigua charge up to 70 Qs (more than $9) – far out of reach for rural Mayans, the majority of whom make about $2 a day.
“Thank you for helping the people,” says the woman, who is 62 and has lived in El Rejón for 36 years. “I appreciate all the help. I thank God for sending people like the doctors here.”
Don’s last patient of the day is a 21-year-old woman who already has lost many of her teeth and had to have another one pulled today. Don just shakes his head, lamenting that she probably won’t get the follow-up care she needs.
“I don’t think I’ve seen one restoration today, one filling,” Don says. “They only have them taken out. Maybe in the future they can get some kind of replacement.
“You always feel guilty, because you have to leave so much undone,” he says. “We can do about one-tenth of 1 percent of all the work that needs to be done in this village. Probably we should stay longer, but we’ve been asked to go to other villages by our other Guatemalan friends. You have to balance that somehow. It’s hard. There’s no good answer to it, but we try our best.”
Peggy says watching God change the lives of the people they care for makes it worthwhile.
“We both agree that we probably wouldn’t do this if it wasn’t for that purpose,” she says. “It’s too hard. It takes a toll on us. God prepares the soil and makes it all fertile. We drop a seed, and it grows.”
© 2008 Called and Sent Media. All Rights Reserved.