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For the past three years as I’ve studied journalism, my focus has always leaned toward foreign news and humanitarian aid. In part because of my lifelong love of travel and in part because of professor McKay Jenkins and the fire he has sparked in me through all the classes I took with him, I am hooked on the stories of faraway lands, the widespread plight of so many of the people who inhabit them and the few heroes who devote their lives to trying to make a change.
I’ve always been aware that from my cozy life in New York City and now in Newark it is easy to learn about and analyze the ongoing events of our globalizing world and even easier to criticize those that do harm and those that do nothing to better it.
As I found out this week, it is much harder to go out and try and fix one of the infinite problems that exist in the Third World. Actually mobilizing, traveling to a place which has an obvious need, hitting the streets to try and make a change took me by such great surprise I was at first both shocked and severely heartbroken. My trip to Punta Gorda, Belize with Healing the Children has been both eye-opening and life-changing, and as an aspiring journalist, of course I now have the responsibility to try to tell as many people as I can about what is going on in this particular small corner of the world.
While many think of Belize as a resort-ridden, rainforest haven of the well-to-do, in reality most of its population lives in conditions familiar to the Third World. Punta Gorda, Belize’s southernmost city on the coast, has more poverty than I have never seen before. The group I traveled with, not affiliated with any religion, sends surgeons and dentists on medical missions around the world. With 22 bags of donated dental supplies, we trudged deep into the countryside and set up makeshift dental clinics in schools and community halls throughout the region.
Most of the children we treated had never seen a dentist in their lives and very well may never get the opportunity to visit one again. We treated 5 year-olds with mouths so decayed almost all of their baby teeth needed to be pulled out and 10 year-olds whose brand new adult teeth were already riddled with decay and infection.
But as we treated hundreds of children, one complaint continued to echo from the communities we reached. They asked not only for dental care, but for basic medical attention. Adults were asking our head malliofacial surgeon to look at their appendixes and broken ankles. Mothers brought their children in with rashes and fevers and refused dental treatment when they discovered we had no general practitioners with us.
I felt guilty, and questioned why this team was even here. The people of the Toledo region needed much more than dentistry, they need maternity doctors and paved roads and more jobs. They needed affordable schools and more permanent, reliable health care. I had come all the way into the jungle with such great hopes and now felt that I could not offer these people what they needed. And the answer was that in fact I couldn’t.
That is one of the many lessons I learned on this trip, that one person, one team of dentists can not fix any one problem. Any single person can only do as much as is humanly possible and unless you are a superhero like Paul Farmer or Fred Cuny or Greg Mortenson, what you are capable of is almost never enough.
We must, however, continue to try. Though discouraged I continued to help this team of adventurous and civic-minded dentists perform procedures an area like Punta Gorda would never have seen. I saw children smile as they received their first toothbrushes, and was thanked by mothers who knew that their children’s mouths were now healthy. While the trip was not easy, it was extremely rewarding.
I know that I will spend many more weeks like this in the future, trying to help children that so desperately need it. I leave Belize with two great gifts, a sense of appreciation for what I have been given and a better understanding of how the world works, so when I return to my comfortable home and start a career in world news, I can say that my perspective is one that now has first-hand experience behind it.
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