A dentist in the slums

Making  A Difference

Spotlight on Vidhi Patel, Year 10: just one of the exceptional young people at JAGS.

Vidhi engaged the whole senior school at assembly today with a very composed presentation on the voluntary work she did with her family over half term in India, providing dental treatment for 150 children from the slum in Vadaj in Gujurat . There’s definitely something in her genes: Vidhi’s parents are both dentists in the UK and she proved to be a natural dental nurse, working brilliantly as an assistant under difficult conditions.

This has taken a year of planning. Mrs Vasant, founder of the Samvedana charity which supports many slum-dwelling children in the area, rented a dental practice the Patels could use to hold dental surgeries each afternoon. There’s no NHS in India, of course, and no chance that these children would have ever visited a dentist before, let alone own toothbrushes and toothpaste. So attendance was a bit of a novelty and there was a lot of explaining about instruments to be done for lively, curious children!  Good news: the fluoride in the water means that they found the children’s teeth in better condition than expected, but a lot more gum disease. Vidhi helped to explain how diet affects their teeth, gently pointing out why lots of sweets = trouble.

Vidhi immersed herself in the charity school in the morning teaching English to the 7 and 8 year olds she described as being a million time more energetic than she expected! Language wasn’t a barrier once she had found ways of using games and fun ways to explain things.  Drawing a star on the board and singing ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’ helped them to learn the letter ‘S’, and the children became enthusiastic performers in small groups, consolidating their knowledge.

Vidhi, her brother and two other children made a visit with Mrs Vasant to see two homes in the slums. They were visibly touched by what they saw and heard, and by the hospitality that came from those who had so little. How could this not be life-changing? Vidhi has been deeply affected by her experience and is determined to do what she can to raise awareness of this project using her photographic diary. Sponsorship is something for us to think about at JAGS: it costs £75 for a slum child to be educated at school.  This is the beginning of an on-going commitment. As The Times in India reported, the Patels are creating records of their dental work so that the charity can take forward treatment through local dentists. The family are also looking into setting up a dental clinic at Vadaj so that volunteer dentists from around the world can come and treat the slum children.