The child hadn’t slept for weeks. His dental pain was profound but not unusual in Guatemala’s remote mountains. So like many others, his mother had walked five hours to get to the clinic. And as soon as the child’s tooth was extracted, he drifted asleep, finally peaceful.
“You know,” one of the founders of the clinic explained to Dr. Natasha Rockwell, “for our children pain is part of their life.” As the only female dentist on a mission trip with a small group of doctors from the nonprofit, DIG or Dream Invest Grow, Rockwell was treating a lot of women and children. “You treat the mother and then the child on her lap. And their dental disease is very progressed.”
Yet, a few months earlier, Guatemala wasn’t even on Rockwell’s radar. She was busy working with her parents in their New Jersey dental practice. However, she recognized that as a recent graduate from Temple Dental, she had missed an important opportunity when Covid halted the school’s mission trips.
“It’s really important to have a world perspective,” she says. That’s why a trip to Africa was tempting, even though not possible. A predental dental student shadowing her in her practice had commented that he was going there to volunteer for a month. But she knew she couldn’t step away from her patients that long.
Another opportunity
Surprisingly, not even 48 hours later, she received a postcard from a doctor In North Jersey who mentioned among other things that he was spearheading a Guatemala mission trip. The plan was to give Mayan villages access to dental care at a new but basic rural clinic. He encouraged her to “just go.”
She says, “That really describes it. You have to see it. You can’t prepare yourself. At Temple Dental, I had experience treating many different groups. But, there, you have to put your emotions aside a bit, to be honest, so you can take in everything that you’re seeing and continue making the best decisions for the patient’s wellbeing while being efficient.”
Rockwell continues, “I could have sat with nearly every single patient for a day of full-mouth rehabilitation. But you have to choose the thing you can do that’s most helpful in the least amount of time. And after you’re done, it’s like the work is just not done. You can never go just once.”
Expecting to return in April, again with her fiancée who speaks Spanish, Rockwell emphasizes: “You can be in your bubble in dentistry, feeling very comfortable.” So she appreciated the unexpected push out of her comfort zone. “I knew the trip could be one of the most rewarding things I would ever do,” she explains. “But I didn’t go to feel rewarded. I just went because I wanted to do something deeper with my profession.”
And now she can involve her family, whose practice is likewise focused on compassion, a critical element of every mission trip. “My parents have always wanted to participate in something like this,” she notes. “Now they have me for coverage, and we can alternate trips.” She also hopes to encourage her twin brother, a Temple Dental 2024 graduate, to join them.