Samburu Dental Clinic Diary: Day 1 & 2

The Safari Collection recently collaborated in organising the first ever mobile dental clinic in the Westgate Samburu Community. This is directly possible thanks to guests staying at Sasaab as part of a Kenya luxury safari with The Safari Collection. Here are some of the highlights from the memorable week.

DAY 1

Thank you to Mitesh and the SmileStar team from the UK. We are so grateful to have you here. This is a new experience for us all and so we were somewhat tentative about how things would go.

We started today at Naisunyai in the far corner of Westgate Commmunity Conservancy. We have an amazing multi-skilled team of four dentists, each with a dental nurse, a midwife, and an opthalmic clinician. We also invited the Westgate nurse to join us and she ran an outreach clinic for the community.

The response was outstanding. We saw at least 15 people with acute tooth pain and removed over 20 teeth, mainly wisdom teeth. We checked all the children in the community, and as you can see form the smiles, the experience was not too terrifying!!

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The nurse ran a clinic for all the mother and child care and Hiram has identified at least six people for cataract surgery as soon as we can arrange it.

samburu kids

Yesilai from Ewaso Lions joined us with Chris, the community manager, and spoke to all the children and community about Ewaso LIons and the link between conservation and tourism. He explained to them that without lions, there would not be tourists and without tourists we would not be able to give them access to the amazing medical team that visited them today.

A great start to the week.

DAY 2

Another fantastic day. The turn-out from the community was brilliant.

Just under 50 people were seen and all had at least one tooth extracted. Our youngest patient was a lovely little girl who needed to have four teeth extracted. She was as good as gold and Sadie gave her a little knitted bear as a gift afterwards.

samburu girl

This brave girl had four teeth removed.

The mother and baby clinic was as busy as yesterday, and Hiram treated 25 patients with eye problems and identified 5 who would be suitable for eye surgery.

He also saw a small boy with a drooping eyelid which could potentially lead to severe problems for the boy in the future and so we will try to arrange for him to have surgery in Nairobi through the Kikuyu eye hospital.

samburu boy with drooping eyelid

Today we saw several people with ear problems and we realise that in the future it would be fantastic to be able to offer the services of an ear nose and throat specialist.

The team came back and did dental checks on all the Sasaab staff, and actually ended up treating six staff at the lodge.

We ended the day with a cheeky little sundowner on Sundowner rock surrounded by elephants – life could certainly be worse!

sundowners from sasaab

Team sundowner after tending to Sasaab staff

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