I never thought I´d say this...

...but dentists are awesome!

Today was our second day in San Lucas Tolimán, and Shom and I spent the morning at the elementary school in Porvenir, a settlement just outside of San Lucas. We went with three community health promoters to the school for a few reasons: we administered fluoride treatments to all the children, gave out toothbrushes, checked every single mouth to record whether they had ¨many cavities,¨ ¨few cavities,¨ or ¨no cavities,¨ and talked about the importance of brushing your teeth to avoid said cavities.

Most of the children had teeth blackened by cavities, so the importance of this public health outreach and education was glaringly apparent to me. I´ve never thought seriously about doing public health work down here until now. I guess I always thought that - as someone who is not and never will be a medical student, someone who gets queasy at the sight of blood - I wouldn´t be qualified to help, and I probably wouldn´t be any good at it. After today, however, I´m starting to think that this may be a good niche for me after all... At this point I am still feeling out all the different volunteer opportunities down here, so I can´t say for sure that this is where I´ll end up. I am, however, excited at the possibility of doing more of what we did today, and gladdened by the prospect that I may actually end up doing something useful and meaningful with my time here!