Dental Trip to the DR

This year Matt and I traveled to the Dominican Republic together to work for a week on a humanitarian dental trip. Matt has gone on several of these before down there, but this was my first time. I was excited to experience this with him and to see the country for myself! We had an early start to the trip and successfully got to the DR with no problems. Here we are waiting for our luggage to come... A sweet picture of what a horrible start of the trip. Right after this, we headed down to wait for our ride and we all put our stuff down to sit and wait. After awhile our ride arrives, I meet Walter (our dentist connection down there) and I walk off without my purse. I get to the van not 3 minutes have gone by and I realize what I had done. I RUN back in there to find nothing where my purse used to sit. Really?! 3 minutes? My trip was off to a horrible start. Luckily Matt had grabbed our passports from me and so I only lost my phone, charger, camera, magazines, sunglasses (2 pair!), and chapstick. Thoroughly annoyed and almost ruined my trip, but Matt got me out of my funk and told me to just let go of it or it would ruin my whole week. I was so mad at those sleezes, I know it was you boys sitting next to us!!!! Oh well.

Be warned... picture overload!Check out the potty stops... umm, not my favorite part of the trip. We had to throw our toilet paper in the trash next to the toilet, no flushing. I got a good workout trying to hover over all those toilets.
We had a body guard down there... Victor. He was a great help with using force to get people to back away when they got too out of control. We needed him!
Lunch break! I felt a little bad taking a break to eat since most of the people waiting for dental work were basically watching us and waiting for us to be done. A little awkward, but I got over by the end of the week.
Matt and I working... it was fun to see how dental work gets done up close. I had fun being his assist for the week. I felt like I could prep that cavity filling myself by the end of the week.
The traffic was driving me CRAZY! Since I was not used to how they drive here in the DR, they made me quite nervous. They make how ever many lanes they want, drive in the middle of two lanes, cut people off like it's nothing, and honk at just about everything and everyone! It was quite the experience.
We were able to take a walk one of the nights down by the Santa Domingo temple. It was gorgeous all lit up at night. We were hoping to do a Spanish session in the temple, but we were giving wrong information and the temple was closed by the time we got there. Next time. But we did meet the temple grounds attendant and he ended up finding us one of the days to get some work done.
A view of some of the lines we had throughout the trip... free dental work creates some craziness in the streets!
Check Haley out! Matt showed me how to give a shot and I gave this girl my first one. Not as bad as I thought it would be, pretty fun.
This was the temple worker we helped. He was such a nice guy, came early and helped us set up and waited around ALL day to get work done. Felt good to help out someone that you knew needed the work done that deserved it.
This was a special trip to the Dominican Republic. Matt usually goes down in January, once a year. But this year the senator (pictured down in the yellow, middle) asked the G3 Foundation (the group Matt goes with each year) to make a special trip for his campaining. He is up for re-election and we basically promoted him. It's a win/win situation for the foundation since he is the one who coordinates transportation for us and lunches while we are down here. If he gets elected he will be running for president in the next couple years... that would be cool to say that we've met the President of the DR! The other people in the picture are Dominican dentists and lab workers.
The trip was never lacking fun times... this is one of the times I helped hold down a kid to get a tooth pulled. I actually think this one ran off after a while and he's probably down there hurting still from a half pulled tooth!
Check out the BEFORE on this one...yikes.
After... much better. So nice to help these people out!!
All and all the trip was a blast!!! I was glad to go and experience the Dominican Republic for myself and know what Matt talks about each time he goes there. He served his mission for our church there and I have a great appreciation for what he lived through those two years, almost.