FEATURE
From left: Terza Dilshad, hygienist; Dr Sheena Vyas, oral surgery SpR; Dr Malcolm Hamilton, dentist; Dr Naomi Rahman, oral surgeon; Rachna Rai, dental nurse; and, Dr Úna Shields, dentist.
Assessing a patient with the help of a translator.
To Greece bearing gifts Irish dentists are among those working to assist the huge numbers of refugees currently stranded in Greece. After seeing the images of the refugee crisis on our screens over the past few years, Dr Úna Shields and I had discussed wanting to do some volunteer work to help. We discovered Dentaid and, through this, Health Point Foundation, two dental volunteering organisations. We contacted them and arranged to fly to Thessaloniki in Northern Greece where there are numerous refugee camps. We fundraised and brought my surgical motor and lots of toothpaste for the children. We met two other dentists from Scotland and England, respectively, and a dental nurse and hygienist from London, and we became a team. In Greece we were introduced to two Health Point Foundation co-ordinators who were also dentists, and they knew how to set up the clinics each day.
Language barriers On our first working day we drove to Diavata camp, an ex-military barracks where there were approximately 400 refugees. Whole families were housed in container units: mostly Syrian and Kurdish and a few Afghani people. The camp
Dr Naomi Rahman BDentSc DChDent (Oral Surg.) FFD RCSI Naomi is a specialist oral surgeon who practises in Dublin, Meath and Kildare.
previously held 2,000 people living in tents, but the month before we arrived there was heavy snow so some people had been moved to small hotels in the area. This was the dental base camp so we had the luxury of two dental chairs and suction, all housed within a shipping container. We were lucky to have translators there who had travelled from Egypt and Australia to volunteer to speak Arabic, and our hygienist was Kurdish so she was able to speak to the Kurds. To speak to an Afghani woman, we had to call our translator’s friend in Australia to translate Farsi over the phone! We quickly started to triage patients and then carry out first-stage root canal treatments, restorations and extractions. Some patients had good oral health and beautiful dental work and others had never seen a dentist before in their life. We were determined to treat our patients with respect and dignity. In one instance we repeatedly asked a young man if he was okay as we were treating him. He smiled and laughed and said: “Yes, I just feel like I’m in a foreign movie!” We later went to the makeshift school, which had four classes, to give the children oral hygiene instruction, toothpaste and brushes.
The dentist is here! On our second day we drove to Lagkadikia Camp, which again held approximately 400 refugees. Our clinic set-up was two massage beds in a container and one outside, with a mobile drill unit and no suction or radiographs. Each morning we walked around the camps with a loudspeaker calling out “The dentist is here” in Arabic, Kurdish and English, and the patients Journal of the Irish Dental Association | April/May 2017 : Vol 63 (2)
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