Going boldly where no hygienist has gone before

BY CHRIS GAETANO
Staff Writer

Above, Palma D’Angelo poses with two of her patients in the African island of Brava. At left, D’Angelo works on a patient in her Dayton office. Dental hygienist Palma D’Angelo encountered wind, rain and a room full of cockroaches, but that didn’t stop her from volunteering her services for the people of a small island off the coast of Africa called Brava.

Between Oct. 10 and 18, D’Angelo, of Monmouth Junction, volunteered with a nonprofit organization called Healing the Children, which provides medical care and other professional services to people in impoverished regions. When the organization advertised that they were going on a trip to provide dental services, D’Angelo jumped at the opportunity.

“It was one of those things I’ve always wanted to do, going to a Third World country and just devote some time to them, and this is a great time for me to do it and the opportunity was there,” D’Angelo said.

D’Angelo joined 11 other volunteers from places such as New Mexico, Connecticut and Maine. D’Angelo was the only one from New Jersey. The plan was for all the volunteers to meet in Boston and fly from there to Africa. There were some small difficulties with the plan, however.

SCOTT PILLING staff The airport had closed due to radar difficulties, leaving many of the volunteers, who also had most of the equipment they needed, stranded in Chicago. They eventually had to fly to Connecticut and use a car service to drive them to Boston. When the airport finally opened and let the plane leave, the volunteers managed to just make it to Boston in time for the 9:30 p.m. flight. D’Angelo had been waiting in Boston since about 4:30 in the afternoon.

The next set of difficulties came when they landed at a small airport on an island called Fogo. The plan was to meet the mayor and get a ferry over to the island of Brava, where they would be doing their work. The problem was that they were expected to arrive on Monday and their plane touched down on Tuesday.

The volunteers, stranded in an airport in a country whose language they didn’t speak, began to get uncomfortable. Some children recognized that they were Americans and fetched the only Americans who lived on the island to help them complete the next leg of their journey, which involved taking a small sailboat through choppy waters that not even natives dare swim in, as the darkness drew nearer and nearer.

“It was like the buccaneer ride where it just goes back and forth and people were just getting green, and it gets dark, so we lost our sun. And here it is, night time, pitch black out there, and they send these two guys to the front with flashlights to look for land,” said D’Angelo.

Upon reaching the shore of the island of Brava, a part of the Republic of Cape Verde which was founded in 1462 by the Portuguese, and counts poet Eugene Tavares as one of its natives, the volunteers went to a small bed-and-breakfast.

“Definitely not the comforts of home but it was a bed, it was a roof over our heads and I wasn’t sleeping in a tent. ... It didn’t really matter where we stayed, we were there to help the people,” said D’Angelo.

What followed were days of almost nonstop working, where lines to see the first dental team ever to visit the island stretched far outside the small, four-room clinic. Together, the volunteers did sterilization, screenings, treatment and gave out information, as well as cleaning and scrubbing. The team itself wasn’t specialized and everyone had their own duties. D’Angelo herself was given a five-minute lesson on pulling teeth and administering anesthesia, two things, as a hygienist, she is not allowed to do in the U.S.

“I miss pulling teeth, I really miss pulling teeth over there,” said D’Angelo.

Because Heal the Children is a nonprofit group, every expense incurred by the trip, such as supplies and the plane tickets, needed to be paid for individually. However, in D’Angelo’s case, her employer, Doctors of Dental Medicine in Dayton, decided to sponsor her trip.

D’Angelo found that while there was a great deal of tooth decay among the people, there was also a large number of patients with very healthy teeth. However, one thing she noticed was that many people’s teeth were brown, which is a sign of fluorosis, which comes from too much fluoride in the water.

Many of the things that people who work in dentistry take for granted were missing during the trip. D’Angelo noted that the room she worked in lacked a dental lamp that would let her see into patients’ mouths, as well as a suction system, making blood a much more common sight than one might be used to.

D’Angelo and the other volunteers only worked for three days, in which they saw more than 300 patients. They decided to cut their trip short due to concerns that the difficulties of getting there would come back to haunt them on their return trip. Despite the short time, however, according to D’Angelo, people were very grateful.

“They were just generous people who made you feel so warm and comfortable there. ... These people had absolutely nothing and they were just so grateful to see us,” D’Angelo said.

Because they could not get to everyone in the time that they were there, D’Angelo expressed an interest in doing this again next year.

“It was definitely a wonderful trip. I will always keep it dear in my heart,” D’Angelo said.