Instead of Guatemala this year’s Los Voladares Medicos (LMV) Latin America trip went to Santa Ana, El Salvador, joining the same doctors, nurses, volunteers and friends again. This presented all kinds of new challenges with going to a new country, new location using a school instead of an existing clinic, new officials to work with, basically new everything.
We found interesting differences between Guatemala and El Salvador, all rather pleasing. We added extra security but on the surface all seems very normal here. For us, we worked with warm friendly and appreciative patients and did not experience any of the violent notoriety El Salvador gets labeled with.
For the Dental department a group of 4 local dentists joined our dental team of Dra Sandra Mendoza and myself. They do clinics like this routinely and make do with what’s available! I’ve never seen patients treated laying only on tables with no suction available with not a single complaint. For Sandra and myself we used mobile dental setups, a collapsible dental chair and a suit-case sized compressor for the drills, also very challenging to work with.
Click here to see a photo album of the trip (opens a new web page).