A few weeks ago we emailed our past and present patients about a charity mission trip through villages in the Central Region of Ghana. The main purpose of our trip was to provide dental care to these people. While I have helped lead five or six of these mission trips over the past decade, we haven’t been back in a long time due to Covid and its travel restrictions.
Covid has also redirected charity giving in a large way, making it tough for other non-Covid programs, especially healthcare programs, to survive. Fortunately, our dental program has been well-sustained for almost a decade with no end in sight because of the generosity of so many people.
In addition to our dental program planning, we also ran large clothing, shoe, and toy drives around Dallas (as we have always done for past trips). We shipped these things to Ghana about 3 months ahead of our trip, along with more than 4,000 bars of soap, thousands of toothbrushes, toothpaste, pencils, and other items that we organized into decorative bags and handed out to every person we screened.
We also brought many soccer balls, which we blew up and gave to many of the children that we saw during our clinics. So, in fact, the trip is about dental care but it is also about much more than that. It’s healthcare and community outreach. It’s about letting poor people in small and remote places know that they are not forgotten, and that they are loved and appreciated - even by people they’ve never met. It is one heck of a special blessing to be involved in this in any capacity.
We ship as much of this stuff as we can in advance so that it can be transported to Ghana on container ships, or otherwise it would be unaffordable. On this trip, in fact, we made two shipments, one closer to our departure deadline. The line of ships coming into port in Tema, Ghana, was so long that our second shipment was repeatedly delayed causing us some additional logistical challenges to get all the local anesthetic and a few other essential items we needed. In the end it all worked out, but it was a serious logistical challenge. (When I went out on Labadi Beach in Accra, Ghana, I could literally see this line of ships extend far out into the Gulf of Guinea.)