Sometimes You Just Have To Be Taken Out of the Way

Turkey-Winter-Earthquake Relief

    My wife Karen’s first dental trip with me was to Turkey after the earthquakes in August and November, 1999. We joined a relief team in January, 2000, and found ourselves in heartbreaking devastation. It was cold and snowing, and was the worst winter they had had in thirteen years. Many people were still living in make-shift shelters of cardboard, wooden planks, or metal.

     We set up our clinic in a camp in Adapazzari, Turkey, which is about eighty miles east of Istanbul. This was where one of the largest epicenters of the quake originated. The camp was made up of pre-fab shelters that had just recently been delivered.

    My primary task was to set up a dental clinic in one of the pre-fabs that would be used by future teams from various parts of the world. I was able to locate some dental equipment in Istanbul with the help of some friends I had made on a previous trip to Turkey. We brought the equipment to the camp and by the time we arrived from Istanbul it was 10:30 at night and snowing heavily. We unloaded the equipment from the van and planned our setup for the next morning.

    It was at this point that I walked back out into the snow to carry in another load when I saw Karen, completely surrounded by young girls and women pushing in on her to find out who she was. I met Karen’s eyes and knew immediately that she was never going to be the same again. She had a tremendous ministry with these devastated women that continues with some of them to this day.

     One of the first Turkish people that we really got to know was our translator named Melda. She is the daughter of a local physician, and has a wonderful love for helping people. She and Karen became fast friends almost immediately.

     A friend of mine named Charlie, who was a retired Boeing Aircraft worker and was good with a pair of pliers and a screwdriver, helped me the next day assemble the equipment. This process took three days as it turned out because all of the equipment was disassembled and in boxes, and there was not one schematic or instruction manual for any of it. One box, however, I opened and it appeared that there was an instruction manual in it. Charlie and I were almost giddy with glee until we found that it was written entirely in Russian. Unfortunately we had no Russian speakers, but at least we had a schematic to look at.

     Melda took me to a local dental supply company that had not been destroyed in the earthquake to get more supplies, and then later that first day she introduced me to the president of the local dental society. The president’s name was Cenap (pronounced jinop), and he was very thankful that our team had come due to the destruction of nearly all clinics and hospitals in Adapazzari. I told him that it would take a few more days to get the clinic ready to see patients, and I was planning on opening it that coming Friday. He said he would be very happy to come by and see how everything was working out.

     It took Charlie and I four days to finish all the assembly and to get our pre-fab shelter into some resemblance of a clinic. The rest of the team, including Karen, went from home to home and distributed blankets, and clothing. They had a great time with each family hearing their stories while drinking hot tea in nearly every home.

     By the time Friday came around I was just about as sick as I had ever been in my life, but word had already gone out into the community that the clinic was opening. Before I even arrived a long line had developed at the door. Karen and the rest of our team prayed for me, but I didn’t know how I was going to examine and treat all the people who were already waiting.

    I prayed for strength and one by one we began seeing the people. Karen and Melda assisted me throughout the morning, but I felt as if I were turning greener and greener by the minute. Nearly everyone who entered the clinic had some tea or biscuits they wanted to share with us. Although each bite of biscuit or swig of tea was prefaced by a prayer to keep it down, I was truly grateful for their kind gesture.

     A lady came in who had broken a tooth while trying to escape her building during the earthquake. She was pleasantly surprised that I was able to take care of her without it hurting her after she had been in pain for some months. She went out of the clinic to where the long line of people who were standing in deep snow and exclaimed through the snow fall, “It didn’t hurt!” Within fifteen minutes the line of people had tripled.

     One time between patients I had a horrible stomach crap that doubled me over in my chair. I remember Melda coming over and laying her hand on my shoulder and whispering in my ear, “God Bless you for helping these people when you are in such pain yourself.” Those words were a wonderful encouragement and gave me strength to carry on.

     About 11 o’clock in the morning Dr. Cenap arrived at the clinic. After a cordial greeting he  looked at me and said in his heavily accented Turkish-English, “Dr. Rob you look terrible.” I told him I felt terrible. He said, “You go lay down I will finish up here.”

I didn’t argue. I left Karen and Melda to assist him and found a closet full of blankets and laid down and very quickly fell asleep.

     I woke up at about five o’clock in the afternoon and found that I no longer felt sick. The fever, stomach cramps, nausea, and achy feeling were completely gone. I got up carefully to make sure it was not just a fluke that I felt better. Believe it or not I actually felt great.

     I walked into the clinic as the sun was setting to find Cenap and Karen dismissing the last of the patients who had stood in the line all day. Melda was the first to notice me and said, “Rob, you look so much better!” Karen and Cenap looked at me with concern, but confirmed her assessment. I felt 100% better!

     Cenap said,”This is a very important project. I will come back next week and work here.” As a matter of fact Cenap kept that clinic running for months. He worked one day every week and coordinated with other international teams from the USA, Canada, France, and England to work in the clinic for the next four months until I got back in May, of that year.

     A thought immediately crossed my mind when Cenap said this. If I had been healthy, Cenap would have simply come to the clinic, watched an American dentist do his thing, and say what a nice job I was doing and gone on about his usual business. Because I was sick, however, and he jumped right in there and saw for himself the tremendous need and the importance of the clinic in this earthquake torn area, he caught the vision for himself and got involved.

     During our teams debriefing in Istanbul a few days later a member of another relief team who had heard about the incident said rather timidly, “You know I hate to say this, but I think God had to just get Rob out of the way so Cenap would get involved.” I and the others whole-heartedly agreed that my illness was just too weird (I’m normally never sick) and that God must have wanted me out of the way for a few hours just enough for our Turkish friend, Cenap to catch the vision.

     It was a valuable experience for all of us, but I told God later in my prayer time that next time He wanted me out of the way, He could just send me to Fiji.

Acorns Are Not Just For Squirrels

Albania- My Very First Village

     Today is Thanksgiving. My favorite holiday. It has been since I was a kid. I think what always made it special to me was in the tradition of how my mom and dad celebrated it. I have carried that tradition now to my own family. This tradition was always to have neighbors, widows, widowers, student who couldn’t go all the way home, foreign exchange students, adults from special care facilities, new families to the area, or any other person we could find that would be alone otherwise on Thanksgiving Day. Thanksgiving Day is a day of giving thanks to God for the many blessings He has given us even when sometimes life has been pretty rough. It is also a day of being able to share what you have, which is what hospitality is all about.

     My first real clue that I didn’t really know what hospitality was all about came in a very remote village in northern Albania my very first overseas mission trip. I was part of a summer project with Campus Crusade for Christ called the Albanian Evangelical Rural Outreach or AERO. I would eventually be on ten such AERO Projekts, but this was my first.

     The goal was to reach every village in Albania with the gospel of Jesus Christ by sending Jesus Film teams into the villages no matter how remote. Now before some of you pull your hair out and scream, “Arrgh, missionaries. They invade and destroy cultures,” let me just say we were invited by the new Albanian government to tell their newly freed people about Jesus. You see the previous Communist government had declared in 1968 that there was no God, and Albania became the first and only officially declared atheist country in the world. Albanians couldn’t practice any form of religion without imprisonment and death. So when the Communist government collapsed in 1991, the new government wanted freedom, including freedom of religion and they wanted to learn about Jesus.

     So the way the AERO Projekt worked was that teams of six people would be taken to a village, meet with the mayor, or ‘first man’ and make arrangements to set up the film equipment, complete with 16mm projector, screen, lights, and generator, in a field to show that night. The next morning the team would travel any means  possible to the next village and then to a third village before returning to the base camp. In the first years the villages were so remote that we had to fly in by helicopter and get around with the equipment loaded on horse or donkey, but that is another story.

     That first day from the base camp the teams were ready to be marshaled into the villages via helicopter, and my team was the first to go. Since I was the team leader I was able to jump up into the co-pilots seat and two of my team mates along with all of our equipment loaded into the back. The scene was so frantic because the on-load and off-load had to be so quick, that we were air born and flying into the grey clouded expanse of the Balkan Alps before I really knew what was going on. I remember looking down through my feet at the rugged terrain below and thinking, “Rob Dakin, you crazy son of a gun! What made you think you could do this?”

     I eventually calmed my anxiety and just thanked the Lord for the opportunity to serve Him. The views were absolutely spectacular as we made our way through the steep mountain valleys dotted with villages perched precariously along its slopes. It took about ten minutes to get to our first village. I later learned that it would take the villagers four days to walk to the closest road in order to hitchhike, if possible, to the nearest town.

     We straffed the village and found a small clearing away from the stone houses were we could land safely and off-load before the villagers got too close to the rotors. Our half-team had no sooner unloaded the equipment when the helicopter took off and left us. We were immediately surrounded by curious villagers. Here I was being crowded in on by total strangers with two Albanian teammates that I had only just met a few hours before, only one of whom spoke English. For the first time in my life I felt totally alone, but totally dependent on God as well.

     I introduced myself to the ‘first man’ and told him why we were in his village. He and the others were extremely excited to have us in their village. I was the first American they had ever seen, and as you may well imagine they didn’t get many visitors so they were very please to have other Albanians in their village. They immediately invited us into their homes, but I told them we still had three other teammates that would arrive shortly, so the villagers brought out a chair for me to sit on and the rest of the entire village sat down in the field to wait for the rest of my team. I should point out that I was not above sitting on the ground with them, but they wouldn’t hear of it.

     After a while someone brought a bag of acorns out and began to distribute them, first to me and then to the others. I looked at the acorns rather dubiously as everyone else including my partners began cracking them open with their teeth. I had never eaten an acorn before, but the villagers seemed to be enjoying them so I put one between my teeth and started gentle pressure. When the acorn hull didn’t budge I immediately thought that I was going to break a tooth before I would get one opened. I noticed that the villagers, who had far fewer and far less health teeth than I had, were having no trouble at all.

     My partner, Bledi, who was the only one who could speak English, looked up at me and asked, “Can’t you eat those with your teeth?” I said half jokingly, “Bledi, I am a dentist in America. The worse thing I could do is break a tooth while trying to eat this acorn. My patients back home would never let me live it down.” I should point out, as many of you who have traveled well know, that humor almost never translates well.

     A woman came up behind Bledi and I and asked Bledi, “Can’t he eat those with his teeth?” And Bledi responded, in Albanian of course, “No he can not eat those with his teeth.” The woman immediately took an acorn and cracked the shell with the only two teeth she had in her mouth, one on the top and one right below it on the bottom, and handed me the meat of the nut over my shoulder. She continued cracking open nuts for me with her own teeth until we had all shared the bag.

     I realized at that moment just how incredibly selfish I was. I also realized that I really had no idea what true hospitality was until that Lady sacrificed her own health for mine. I determined right there that I had a great deal more to learn from these simple people who had no electricity, no running water, no roads, or easy access to the comforts of civilization.

     This was my first encounter, out of eventually hundreds, with the amazing hospitality of the Albanian people. I have used them for the last seventeen years as a standard for

measuring my own meager attempts at hospitality.

A Whole New Way of Thinking About a Successful Dental Appointment

Albania- Mid-May

     In May one year I set up a clinic in a Gypsy village in Albania. I did as much research as I possibly could about the Roma before I left, but one thing I was sure of was that I was not going to know everything. I did read in an interesting anthropology book called ‘Bury Me Standing’ about the Eastern European Gypsies which at least impressed on me that if I was ever going to learn anything about them I should never ask questions, but simply observe.

     I met up with an Albanian dentist friend of mine named Ardi, and the two of us went to a Gypsy village about two hours north of the capitol, Tirana. We met with a young Albanian pastor named Mondi who along with his small church in Leshe was trying to reach out to the Gypsies and help them in what ever way they could, and inviting Ardi and I to set up a dental clinic was one way to do that.

     Ardi and I set up a make-shift clinic in what was probably someones garage with the portable equipment I had brought from America. It didn’t take long for the news to go through the village that two dentists were there to take care of any dental problems they might have. Soon there was a long line of people waiting to see us, or at least it should have been a long line, but instead it was nearly the entire village trying to pack into the garage slash clinic to see what was going on, and to taunt their family and friends who were already seated, and basically make the entire event into a social gathering rivaled only by weddings, funerals, and Christmas.

     We discovered very early that the Gypsy society is matriarchal with the women calling the shots while the men sat around and watched us from a distance. One woman had never been to a dentist before and she was terrified at the prospect of laying in our dental chair which was actually only one of those folding canvas lounge chairs, which I had bought at the Colman’s store in Wichita and lugged over to Albania. The woman was in a lot of pain from a bad tooth and so she finally steeled her courage enough to let me take care of her.

     After I had done what needed to be done she rose from the chair and said, “Oh, that didn’t hurt!” Of course it was in Albanian with her own mother tongue accenting it, but the gist of it was that she was very pleased to be alive and not in pain any more from the previous toothache. After she shook my hand, nearly ripping my arm out of the shoulder joint, she said something that we took to mean she was going to go get her children and set off to find them.

     As it turned out she had five children, none of whom wanted to be anywhere near our clinic or have anything to do with us. One by one, however, she dragged them in and threw them into the chair, the youngest ones first. What I mean by ‘she dragged them in‘ is she literally dragged them in kicking and screaming. One child had thrown himself to the ground; undaunted she grabbed his ankle and flipped him over onto his stomach so that he could no longer kick at her and she dragged him while he clawed the dirt frantically trying to escape leaving long claw marks trailing behind. Like I said the atmosphere was almost carnival-like so even though I felt bad for the child I couldn’t help but get tickled at the way the rest of the villagers interacted with the mother and the child. I don’t know what they were saying and I’m sure that I really don’t want to know what they were saying, but the best way to describe it was animated chaos with a strong touch of vaudeville. I remember making a silent prayer of thanks for my relatively peaceful practice back home, and my own quiet, gentle, loving mother. In the end Ardi and I took turns working with her children and by the time it was all over we were buddies with the four younger kids, who no longer had fear and toothaches.

     The real challenge came later when the woman tried to drag her last and oldest child in. It was a very warm day and her son was wearing only a gray sweat bottom with no shirt or shoes. He was about eleven or twelve years old, so he was much bigger and stronger than his siblings. The mother was having a time with him, but she had managed to latch on to his wrist and was pulling and tugging him toward the dental chair as he was pulling and tugging with equal ferocity to escape to the freedom that lay beyond. Suddenly he broke free of her grasp and turned to flee leaving nothing for her to snag but the back of his britches. He ran with all his might away from the clinic as she pulled with all her might to haul him back. The sweat bottoms ripped away and he ran out of the clinic screaming, and yes… buck-naked as she stood there scolding after him holding the empty bottoms.

     All the men sitting there laughed and pointed as he galloped down the lane. My buddy Ardi looked at me and said very seriously in his thick Albanian accented English, “This does not speak good of our dentistry.” I just stood there too dumbfounded for a moment to say anything. We eventually were able to persuaded the boy to sit in the chair the next day and we took care of his toothache. After that he was our friend and hung around the clinic asking questions and believe it or not, consoling other terrified children that it wasn’t so bad.

     I sometimes have patients in my practice apologize as they leave my office for being afraid or nervous. I usually tell them not to worry about it and that it is normal to be anxious, but then I add that at least they hadn’t run out of the office buck-naked. The story of the Gypsy boy always makes them feel better.

     The Gypsy boy and his britches gave me a whole new definition of what a successful dental visit should look like. As long as I don’t have anyone screaming and running out the door buck-naked I, at least, usually feel pretty good about it.

Until next time, God bless!

Looking Out the Window of an Orphanage

Kazakhstan- December

Natasha gazed out the window. She stood motionless watching the children outside playing in the snow. She pressed her hand against the cold glass and then laid her other hand over the top of it.

I wondered what was going through her mind as I sat on the cold wooden bench in the hallway outside the make-shift clinic that had been set up in a room in the orphanage. Other children sat around me, but I couldn’t help watching the little girl at the window.

It was Saturday. Many children had been taken out for the day by their sponsor families, but Natasha remained alone. At first I thought she may have been wishing she where outside playing in the snow. I learned later that her sponsor family didn’t come to take her out for the day. She stood looking out the window of the orphanage praying that she would be adopted someday and have a family of her own.

My heart ached for her and the other children around me. I cannot possibly understand what it is like for them, but I want to try.

I was tired. I had been seeing the children in the dental clinic since early in the morning. We had taken a ten hour train ride just to get here and had only arrived the day before. As it turned out today we didn’t see our last patient until one o’clock in the morning. My wife Karen along with friends from Wichita, Dwayne, DeAnne, and Mark worked along side our Kazakh friends, Dr. Igor, Luba, Olga, and Timor to ready the room for the next child.

Something about Natasha got me to thinking about all the other missions I had been on over the years. I have had many of my patients back home tell me I should make my journals public so they could read them. I watched Natasha sigh as a friend, bundled up in a knitted cap, scarf, and mittens covered thickly with an outer coat push her face against the window from the outside. I heard her call out, “Dobry dyen, Natasha,” as she giggled and turned back to play in the snow.

I thought about the request to publish my journals. Maybe now would be a good time to tell the story of children like Natasha in Kazakhstan, and the story of so many others I have had the privilege to get to know over the years.

Karen came out into the hallway and called to me, “Dr. Rob, our next guest is ready to be seen.”

I took one quick glance at Natasha just as she turned and met Karen’s smile with a broad smile of her own. I ducked into the room and grabbed a pair of exam gloves. I leaned out into the hallway as I put them on to see Natasha snuggled next to Karen. Karen’s arm was around her as she was gently stroking Natasha’s cheek.

Natasha is eleven. She has been an orphan since she was six years old. She is just one child out of an orphanage with many children. This is, however, the nicest orphanage I have ever seen. The children are loved, well fed, well clothed, and well educated. Dwayne, a math teacher, was impressed to see a fifth grader working on his calculus homework. All the children began piano lessons at the age of four. They had such an amazing desire to learn so that they could make their lives better someday. We heard this goal expressed by many of the children, particularly the older ones.

Every meal our team was blessed with a song or a recital by the children. I felt bad that I was not prepared to sing back to them when they asked. Next trip I will be ready. The Kazakhs love music.

One of my most precious treasures that I have been given on my missions is a large poster with all of the children’s hand prints in bright colored paints along with messages of thanks and greeting written under each hand print in Russian. Across the top is a big Thank you in Russian pronounced Spa-see-bow in various bright colors. I have it framed and hanging in the reception room of my dental office in Wichita. It is a beautiful reminder of those wonderful children in northern Kazakhstan.

Yet this was still an orphanage. The children prayed for families of their own. Some of the older children had given up hope that they would ever be adopted. Now days it is almost impossible to adopt a Kazakh child away from Kazakhstan even though it was not that long ago it was pretty common.

Yes, this story should be told because it is the story of life. It is the story of people in relationship. It is a story of hope when strangers can come to love each other across differing cultures. If we don’t see the world as people, then we will only see the stuff and we will totally miss the beauty of it.

Will you use the blessings God has given you to be a blessing to others?

Blessings until next time!