Katie Holdgate, a 24 year old Sheffield University graduate in Dentistry embarked on an emotional and challenging trip to Denang, Vietnam with the child dental charity East Meets West Dental Foundation. So what made Katie choose to do this? "I saw the chance to work abroad as a once in a lifetime opportunity and unlike many of my friends who travelled to America and Australia, I wanted to experience something different and feel I was doing some good in the world".
The remote mountain village was deprived and the children, all of school age, had never seen a dentist in their lives. "Most of them did not even own a toothbrush" Katie hastened to add. Their makeshift clinic was setup in the local school hall, which would play host to 400 of these young patients in little under a week. There were 2 volunteering dentists, Katie being one of them, and 3 Vietnamese dentists facing this mammoth task.
Each child queued up to see 3 dentists. The first would do a preliminary check-up. "Then each child carried their mirror and dental equipment in a box to the next dentist with their treatment plan on a piece of paper and was then given an injection." The child would then move on to the third and final dentist who would either fit a filling or take a tooth out, which was Katie’s role. "I took out 46 teeth in one morning, my wrist hurt a lot!"
Katie took little time to think of the other hard parts of her trip "The hardest part was communicating with the children we were treating as they could not speak English at all." Although they had nurses who would try to help overcome the language barrier, Vietnamese is a complex language. "We were taught a few Vietnamese phrases but the children looked at us as if were crazy! It turns out that every word in Vietnamese has up to 6 ways of pronouncing it. We thought we were saying ‘hello’ when in actual fact we were saying ‘chicken soup’!"
Unfortunately for Katie, this wasn’t the last time chicken soup was going to get the better of her. When asked of a specific incident that stayed with her, she smiled. "The culture is very different and on the first day they made us a soup for lunch. I took a spoonful and found an entire chicken’s head in it... eyes and all!" Katie seemed completely un-phased by this unwanted surprise and appeared to look back on the event with an air of fondness. On a more serious note she added "I suppose the attitude of the children and how polite and well behaved they were compared to British children made me realise how spoilt this country is!"
Katie emanated pride in her work and asking whether the experience was rewarding for her personally as well as the Vietnamese children seemed redundant. Her response to the question of what was the most rewarding aspect of her work was as heart-warming and genuine as to be expected. "The number of children I was able to help in the time period was really great, because the charity was really organised we were able to be very efficient."
The question of whether Katie would do it again elicited a confident and determined response. "I will definitely do it again, however not necessarily to the same place in the world. I like to travel to different parts of the world and it is good to incorporate this with the charity work." Katie continued to tell me of how many countries are in desperate need of dental treatment with such an admiral passion, concluding by saying
"One day, when I am financially stable I would love to be able to dedicate 1 week every year to charity work."
When first approached to be interviewed on her charity work, Katie was said to have physically recoiled at the idea. When quizzed on why, she simply stated "I feel silly. I don’t think my charity work was a big deal!" Humbled and modest, Katie is an inspiration and the work she has done is undeniably invaluable. Young dentists should aspire to follow in Katie’s footsteps, albeit politely declining the local chicken soup.