Coastal Dental Brigade
March 12, 2025 by
The vehicle-swallowing-sized mud puddles signal the entrance to San Juan. It’s where the pavement ends. And where the lack of resources begins. We are welcomed with a traditional Garifuna dance. Drums and costumed performers fill the open-air space in the school courtyard of our first clinic location. Rather than set the rhythm, we learn, the drum’s beat takes a lead from the dancers. Donning curious masks and colourful threads, seashell-adorned storytellers stomp out their own beat.
And just like that, the stage is set. The team of 18 who have travelled from Canada to provide dental service to coastal communities in Honduras fall into a rhythm of their own. And it’s a wonderful thing to bear witness. In coordination with local health centres and with the support of local schools, teachers, and community leaders, dental care is provided to hundreds of patients in makeshift clinic locations.
It perhaps goes without saying that dentistry in challenging locations is not without its challenges. And while stressful in the moment as we strive to be prepared for all possibilities, it’s in the collaboration that the magic happens. Community members and visiting volunteers alike rise up with the resourcefulness required to keep the rhythm.
Volunteers simply make it work — enduring the contortions and deep squats required to treat patients in ergonomically-challenged setups, kneeling to the level of the youngest patients to offer comfort and handshakes and high fives, stacking concrete blocks to raise tiny tables, and inevitably doing more with less. Not to mention the arduous tasks of alleviating pain and treating infection. But it’s mitigating inevitable outcomes that proves the most satisfying. The last patient on the last clinic day is a young woman who arrives with holes in her front teeth and leaves with the confidence to smile wide and shine on.
Local friends bend over backwards to help our team help their community — splicing an extension cord into the power grid when voltage is low, lending a compressor when a malfunction occurs, sourcing scrap wire to repair an equipment failure, and wielding a machete with a wheelbarrow of coconuts to offer refreshment at the end of a long day. It’s little things. It’s big things. It takes a (global) village.
This team had heart. In spades. The tradition of sharing daily highs, lows, and kudos was a beautiful reminder to pause a little more often to acknowledge and recognize the impact we have on one another. Near and far. We are all connected. Just as our team made an impact on the patients treated, so too have we been impacted – by kindness, by community, by connection. The world is like that. We travel not to exploit, but to understand. And as the world gets smaller, our minds get opened wider. What a gift.
We pack up, the pulse of our activities slow, the beat of those drums taking a lead from the dancers fades away but no less parallels the work of Change for Children. Taking our lead from communities and contributing to solutions, we keep the rhythm. Together.
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