Surgery and Healing in the Developing World - Dartmouth-Hitchcock

Outreach Dentistry
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medical mission in September of 2001. I had packed all of the medicines I would be
taking and the instruments for the surgical and dental practice I would be leading in
the Himalayas, and had checked all of these supplies in at Ronald Reagan National
Airport in Washington DC. I was just boarding the plane for the first leg of my
journey just before 10:00 AM on the morning of September 11, 2001. I looked up
startled to witness the off-course approach of an American Airliner off the Potomac
River noise-abatement approach as it crashed into the Pentagon. As was much of the
world, I was stunned by this event, and knew that the world would not ever be the
same after this fateful day. I was holding my camera, prepared for the events a half
world away, and reflexly took a few shot of the drama unfolding before my eyes (Fig.
14).
With all air traffic stopped, we were herded out of National Airport, trapping all
my medical supplies still in the baggage check-in aboard the plane that never flew
that day. I witnessed a large number of people whose plans were disrupted, but it
seemed that each one of us, as we were told to flee into the Metro Underground
stations as after-explosions were still rocketing upward over us and debris, smoke
and hot gases were still falling on us, soiling us from the Pentagon fall out—yet no
one was pushing and shoving to get ahead of any other. Businessmen with carryon
luggage on Smarte Carts, simply took suitcases off the trolleys and helped elderly
overweight passengers onto them to wheel them to safety.
The Ultimate in Misunderstanding: A Higher Barrier to Be
Bridged
I thought of the community that had come together under the crisis of that
moment that had continued later in the weeks that followed the strikes on New
York, Washington and a field in Pennsylvania. I had been headed toward a troubled
land, the Spiti Valley, a high arid mountain valley adjacent to Afghanistan and insinuated
along the roof of the world between India and Pakistan who had also had
recent troubles. And now, the everyday violence of distant intolerances had come
home to America
Eventually, I made my way by Amtrak train and rental car to take the first international
flight to leave (flown by Lufthansa several days later, now overpacked with
the medical bags I could only claim after a delay of several days from the still-closed
Ronald Reagan National Airport) and made my way among few other passengers on
board entering long lines of additional security checks through Frankfurt and Delhi
to Chandrigarh by train and a rented car and driver through Simla to Kaza, Spiti,
threading my way through the Kunzum-La Pass (elevation 4.551 meters) to begin
my repeat medical mission in clinics held in or near Buddhist monasteries. As I
completed the mission, I was caught up in the fireworks a half-world away from
where I had started, as cruise missiles streaked across the mountains into the neighboring
Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Somehow, I had moved from one end of the
world to another in a peaceful medical mission among devoutly religious Buddhist
patients in a remote setting isolated along the Roof of the World, to be caught up as
an eyewitness in the caldron antithesis of humanitarian activity on each end.
Most medical and dental professionals, after addressing the diagnosis and treatment
of a problem of such personal or social magnitude, would ask a reasonable
question confronting this and any other human problem in their practice. How
might this have been prevented? Surely, if there is mutual understanding, such terrorist
acts should be far less likely, since one would not wish todestroy the life and
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