The picture shows the dental clinic where Gilbert normally works. He recently emailed concerning a lady he helped some time back with untreated tertiary syphilis and as a result had the oral sores.

Gilbert writes: “the work you do has lasting effects, sometimes even long after you leave. That lady, who is by the way alive and fine now, had been saved by a friend who had come to Kabwohe for the September clinic  gave us. This lady called one of the numbers we had put on the advert posters, she asked me to go help tell what was wrong with her friend’s mouth. This would not have been possible if we hadn’t done the Kabwohe clinic.”

In September 2009 Barbara Koffman led another successful dental mission to  remote villages in Uganda. Gilbert, one of the Uganda dentists on the team, commented:
“Most of the people in these areas have no dentist to visit within miles and miles, and even more of these areas had people who had no idea at all that the mouth is a place that requires regular cleaning just like other body parts. We performed procedures with materials bought and donated by our kind friends in the UK and abroad. At one of the clinics I was doing suturing on an old lady that I was sure would otherwise never have had such an expensive suture in her mouth. Sutures are a luxury here. The gloves you donate and other stuff actually make a difference in the lives of our people. I was shocked that some of the stuff we use is for single use only! I mean, a suturing forceps can be sterilized and used over and over, I still don’t understand why in the UK it’s a single use forceps!”
“Barbara and the whole dental team came to my district in Kabwohe Bushenyi and gave free oral surgeries to over 440 rural people in the two days. It was an honour to us – the place is far, so far in the west, roads are so bad, there was no telephone network for two days and therefore it was so hard to organise …”
Click here for Gilbert’s story