Dental hygiene

I worked in the primary school today, and instead of helping with the 2nd grade class, I'd arranged to go in with Matt, another volunteer, to give dental hygiene presentations to as many classes as we could get round to. Dental hygiene is a major issue here, as so many children are malnourished, and so many parents don't educate their children to clean their teeth - and they can't all afford toothbrushes and toothpaste. It seemed like a good idea to try to educate the children in the primary school as they are at an age when they can save their teeth.

This was inspired by Matt, who had prepared posters on dental hygiene for one of his placements, though was yet to actually give any presentations. I suggested the presentations to the Head at the primary school, and he agreed, so we were all set. The only tricky thing was that we had to do the presentations in Spanish and although we had Matt's fluent Italian and my French, we had a few problems explaining things on a practice run - my Spanish is improving but it has its limits! Luckily, Marisol, our progamme coordinator, agreed to come with us and she saved the day! We had a great morning - we managed to get round to all 6 classes and the children seemed really interested and lots of them took down the recipe for home-made toothpaste! Matt put on his white coat and took in his toothbrush to give technical demonstrations on how to brush teeth. We showed pictures of what a tooth is made up of, talked about the different kinds of teeth, how to brush them, and what causes decay and how to prevent it. Hopefully some of them will remember to brush their teeth a bit more often, or maybe start to do so. Worth a try anyway!

And our Spanish improved too - Marisol did most of the first presentation, but by the end Matt and I were managing most of it on our own. We're now hoping to be able to do the presentations elsewhere in the city ...