San Luis, Mexico and a new semester

Yes, it says "beef and pork tacos" in white on that small building.

The church building reflects the rising sun in a small neighborhood of the city of San Luis, Mexico.

Rows and rows of salad greens, cabbage, cotton and other cash crops...

The day after finishing fall semester exams, I traveled to San Luis, Mexico to visit several schools and churches with oral health workshops and tooth brushes/paste. I enjoyed my 9-day trip (except spending a long night and morning of Christmas Eve in the Pheonix airport) and spent the holidays with family in the Valley. Returning to a new (second) semester, I felt a new sense of belonging in my green scrubs, among 93 other first year dental students. I've enjoyed getting involved in several legislative/lobbying days with the Virginia Dental Association and the Virginia Oral Health Coalition. It is inspiring to meet dental and non-dental professionals who are passionate about educating politicians about the realities of oral health care and the requests of the profession to better meet the needs of various populations. During exam week and during the past few weeks, I have had the opportunity to visit a long-term care facility (aka nursing home) dental clinic and am continuing to explore gerodontology. Realizing the great need for increased access to oral health care for the elderly population (and acknowledging that the baby boomer population may require a bulk of time from my generation of dental professionals), I am excited to start a geriatric dentistry study club at the dental school (our first meeting will be next week!). I am also ecstatic about getting involved in an Inter Health Professionals Alliance at VCU, which runs a monthly "Kroger outreach and health screening" session at a local grocery store (serving undergraduate college students as well as the surrounding residents of all ages, many of whom are uninsured). Hereafter, the group would like to focus their efforts around oral health, linking it to systemic health. That gives a public health-attracted dental student like me another avenue of distraction (and then I ask myself why I'm not getting straight A's in dental school...). In any case, I become giddy to imagine how I might blend my interests in public health with dental clinical skills and the perceived needs of the geriatric population.

I think we left nearly 400 tooth brushes/pastes at this school. The kids loved the cars and princess handles of the brushes. I hope they remember what S. mutans does in their mouths and reach for their gifted hygiene supplies.

Many enjoyed brushing, touching, or looking at Carlos' (Charlie's) huge teeth. They were all convinced the crocodile's dentition was real.

I attended a 'worship and music leaders retreat' several weeks ago, the theme of which was hospitality. Among other interactions and messages, it was intriguing to hear from a Benedictine Abbot from Minnesota talk about their tradition and monastery's norms regarding accepting guests/visitors. Below is a poem that I found when later thinking about the topic.

During an evening outing to Rumorosa, a high elevation settlement near Mexicali, Mexico, we took refuge from a heavy rainstorm in a schoolbus that was transformed into a cabin by the parents of the pastor's wife. 

While we waited for the rain to subside, we tried to warm up the poorly-insulated school bus with this nifty stove. A nearby tienda (shop) sold us some sausage, tortillas and cheese for a great meal.

The pastor's mom and niece sell furniture that the pastor's brother makes out of pallets. He stains the wood with a diluted mixture of pen ink and finishes the furniture with candle wax. I hope to make some of my own furniture someday, too...via creative measures such as these : )

Hospitality

I asked Love to help me
greet the stranger in myself.
I knew how to open my door to the world
and greet everyone out there as friend
but I didn’t have any kind of welcome
for the impoverished one within.
She was the weakness I couldn’t acknowledge.
She was the pain I didn’t allow.
She was the leper I’d tried to cast out the city,
the one who cried at night in lonely places.
I thought that if I let her in
she’d cause me no end of trouble, and I was afraid.

But Love helped me to prepare a feast.
We set the table, Love and I,
and then I did it,
I invited my stranger.
‘Answer the door,’ said Love.
‘You have nothing to fear.’

She came in slowly.

I put my arms around her
and embraced her in her rags
and we wept together for years of separation.
I sat my stranger at the head of the table,
gave her the best of food and wine
and, claiming her as my own,
began to introduce her to my friends.
‘But who shall I say she is?’
I whispered to Love.
‘I can’t call her a stranger now.’
Love smiled and said, ‘Don’t you know?
She is the Christ.’

Joy Cowley
Aotearoa New Zealand

My cousin and I visited an art museum in DC on New Year's Eve.

The first and second year dental classes collected toys for tots before Christmas (I'm community service co-chair of my class this year).

Some of my classmates posed for a mock representation of our 'injection day,' when we practiced two injection techniques on each other. My eyelid and nose were only numb until lunch time : /

 Upon returning to Richmond, I was asked to write about my short experience in Mexico for a church newsletter. I decided to reflect on what these kinds of trips mean for me spiritually. Below is the entry:

Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. 1 Cor 13:12 (NIV)

Whenever I am away from home, I have found that I learn about my usual surroundings and myself more than if I were actually there. Interacting with people that are different than me, living in circumstances that are different than those in which I live, becomes like gazing into a mirror, trying to discern the image of God that I ought to see. I am able to look at my reflection with greater clarity when aided by the contrast that cross-cultural encounter offers. My short 9-day trip to San Luis, Mexico allowed for such ‘mirror-gazing,’ two reflections from which I will share.

In a book that I’d brought along and read at the start of my trip, Leonard Dow proposes the idea of the “professionalization of poverty” as a concept for the praise-worthy task of choosing to live simply (as opposed to making do with what you have).¹ While eating two simple but hearty meals a day with the Mexican pastoral missionary family, traveling by bus and on foot to neighboring cities, and washing my clothes in an outdoor water basin (a pila), I wondered how I loved God and my neighbor in my daily activities and how I might make adjustments to do so more directly without “professionalizing” the gesture.

It was an honor to be a guest in the home of the pastor’s mother for a night, watching her cook beans over an outdoor fire and roll out dozens of tortillas for the day. While surveying the family pictures, wedding portraits, and art hanging on the walls, I encountered a plaque showing one of the siblings uniformed and armed, while kneeling on a field; to the right of his picture was a letter of gratitude to his mother. When inquiring of the pastor whether the church considered themselves pacifists, it was explained to me that Mexico was a peace-loving country, the military of which spends its time in the mountains chasing the drug traffickers as they grow their crops, and that supporting the military as a church was how we are to “submit to our governing authorities,” as Paul instructs us to do in his Epistle to the Romans. When I struggled to explain without sounding threatening that I wasn’t sure that taking anyone’s life for any reason was fulfilling God’s will, I wondered if maybe my perspective might be called “professionalized pacifism.” I exist in a country and social network in which I can claim my right to free speech or religion (among other privileges) and where I do not feel a constant threat to my life. Many would say that this is as a result of the country’s strong militant action. From this comfortable peak (to which I might deny militant credit), is it too easy for me to ignore the complex history of violence in other lands and demand a perspective that is outside of what experience has taught those groups to believe? Perhaps a heavy dose of compassion is necessary in keeping us earnest in our longing for peace.

Visiting numerous groups of children in schools and churches, I hoped my oral health lessons and toothbrush/paste-gifting were received as a sincere desire for their well being rather than just another donation from the local church or the US. Nonetheless, I am grateful to have had yet another opportunity to visit people in their homes in San Luis, Mexico. Karen Armstrong writes, “Unknowing remains an essential part of the human condition. Religion is at its best when it helps us to ask questions and holds us in a state of wonder—and arguably at its worst when it tries to answer them authoritatively and dogmatically.”² I am hopeful that while each of us walks our paths of faith we take time to interact with those that may seem to be on a slightly different path. In considering our differences, perhaps exchanging the gift of contrast, we might more clearly see the reflection of God’s image in us as a diverse family of believers, awaiting the day when we will all see God face to face and share our one and true faith eternally.

¹ Longacre DJ. 2010. Living More With Less. (pg 47)

² Armstrong K. 2010. Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life. (pg 118)

Last Friday, I acquired a flat tire six blocks from the school. When I left lab for the day, snow had already coated the streets. I changed my back inner tube and started the slushy way home. When a train decided to cross Brook Rd, I stopped to snap a picture of the adventurous evening. [Yes, that is a 'horse crossing' sign in the background--who knew there would be a stable across from the metal recycling center in the city!]

An evening stroll down Wentbridge Rd on what could have been Richmond's blizzard of the season.

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

The dental school is only several blocks from the capital building, yet I rarely  make the intent to visit. Joining several lobbyist groups makes me realize that "we the people" are the government and are welcome and necessary in those walls.

...So there's plenty going on to keep things interesting. Asking a professor to comment on the statistic that says dentistry is the profession with the highest suicide rate, he said it's important to keep changing and moving--to keep things from getting stale...I might be on the right track.