El Programa 'Sonrisas Felices'
The Happy Smiles Program

The ACEBAR crew is excited about many of their plans and hopes for the future.  One of our most exciting efforts, however, is our fledgling Sonrisas Felices – Happy Smiles – program.  With this program we will focus on preventive oral hygiene education and provision of dental health treatment. 

Through very generous donations of equipment, funds, and time, ACEBAR is the proud new owner of all the equipment needed for a fully equipped dental office, complete with an electric dental chair with attached light, a compressor, and a drill for cleaning and filling teeth.  We are now in the process of soliciting trained and licensed volunteer dentists and licensed hygienists from anywhere in the world to fulfill the potential of our brand new clinic (click here to inquire about short and long-term volunteer opportunities with CEBAR).  

Meanwhile, through a dedicated grant from a generous Arizona couple, ACEBAR now has the funds to provide a salary for a technician to clean teeth, establish a medical records file system, and to make presentations on dental hygiene in remote villages of the municipality.  Finally, through the largesse of a US-trained Guatemala City dentist (who also gifted us with the dental  chair), we have the offer of free training for a ‘technician/hygienist’ – a truly significant gift in a country whose schools offer no dental hygiene program. 

We have hired Lucy, our first hygienist-in-training, and packed her off to Guatemala City for training after an orientation by fire -- four days of grueling and frenetic tooth-pulling by a U.S. volunteer who came with a medical mission the last week of 2006.  The working plan for Lucy's responsibilities include about half-time cleaning teeth in the office, with the rest of her time dedicated to presenting lessons in oral  hygiene in the dozens of rural schools that dot the 400 square kilometers and 87 villages that comprise Chichicastenango. 

 We hope to solicit sample tubes of toothpastes and extremely low cost or free toothbrushes for her to distribute in her capacity as hygiene trainer.  She will also serve as assistant to visiting volunteer dentists from other countries, and we have high hopes that she will ably represent ACEBAR in conferences and professional meetings over public health issues around Guatemala designed to better help the rural poor of Guatemala and to find further funding for the project. 

Virtually all of our public health efforts are in coordination with el Centro Cultural de Asistencia Maya, or CCAM.  CCAM, which publishes the Maya calendars sold on Centro Maya's Splash Page trains and coordinates health promoters who work with Public Health doctors in more than 30 of Chichi's isolated and otherwise service-less rural 'comunidades,' or hamlets that are scattered across the 400 square kilometers of the municipality.    

About the Photos

In the first photo, women anxiously wait in line at a rural schoolroom doubling as a clinic to have their teeth pulled during the 2005 CMMI Medical Mission.  

In the second, the dentist injects anesthetic in preparation for pulling a tooth.  The Missions include a number of medical specialists, but the dentist is always the busiest.  

In the third, Lucy, our new dental hygieniest, gets a crash course in fieldwork with the 2006 mission.  By the end of the first day she had become adept at interviewing patients and identifying teeth that needed pulling.  A young woman of remarkable composure who speaks impeccable Maya K'iche', she also demonstrated a natural talent for comforting and reassuring nervous patients.

At Bottom Left, Lucy holds the head of a stoic young girl being anesthetized in preparation for an extraction.

At Bottom Right, and in great contrast to the schoolroom clinics where she began working, Lucy nervously waits with Max Kintner to meet Dr. Enrique Vizcaino, a U.S. trained pediatric dentist who trained Lucy in assisting dentists, keeping records, and performing hygienic cleanings.  Following maintenance work on the dental chair and light donated by Dr. Vizcaino, along with a compressor and dental drill/suction donated by Christian Medical Mission, Inc. Lucy began work in the new ACEBAR facility.

Adult patients are almost invariably women, although many male children are brought to the clinic by their mothers.  The women do not want their teeth filled ... a sentiment perhaps inspired by the poor quality of most fillings done by local unlicensed 'dentistas populares' who work without proper equipment, and who have little or no formal training for the services they perform.  With the Sonrisas Felices program, ACEBAR hopes to provide high quality fillings at very low cost to patients who do not need to sacrifice teeth, and to offer a better facility for more serious procedures.  During the missions pictured here, for example, both dentists pulled multiple sets of wisdom teeth.  Sometimes large molars would fractured, requiring oral surgery  case, the tooth crumbled as he pulled it, meaning he had to cut the gum open to remove tooth fragments, then suture the incision.  Such procedures would clearly be more safely done in an office offering proper chair, light, and compressor for washing and suctioning.