Dentist, police officer team up to teach skills in West Africa

Thanksgiving may be a uniquely American holiday, but thankfulness itself is not unique to any culture.

And in the West African nation of Sierra Leone, there is surely much gratefulness today for a couple of visitors from the Fox Valley area.

Dr. Brian Evans, a Bartlett resident with a Bloomingdale dental practice, and Sgt. Tom Linder, a 25-year veteran of the Elgin Police Department, are back in Sierra Leone this week for the third time in 13 months.

Their mission is to teach lay people how to provide dental and optometry services in a country where professionals are in severely short supply.

In just six days two for classroom training and four for clinical practice dental students are taught to safely extract or fill teeth under local anesthetic. Optometry training takes less than a day. Students learn how to look for eye injuries and disease, conduct vision tests and work up a prescription based on a seven-level “ladder,” all in the span of about 15 minutes.

The dental students, of course, are taught by Dr. Evans, D.D.S. But with no optometrist on hand, training for vision testing is conducted by Linder, who isn't bothered at all by his lack of degree.

“These people may not have been able to see effectively for a long time,” Linder said. “There isn't an optometrist in town. There isn't an optometrist in the whole country, except maybe in Freetown, the capital. So when they get a pair of glasses that work, they're really thankful.

“You get an old person who comes in and can't see, and they remember the day where they could read a book, but over the years their eyes have just decayed and decayed, and you put a pair of glasses on them and they can read again oh, man, you talk about joy,” Linder said, his own eyes misting.

The dentist and the cop, who became friends when they participated in a Brazilian outreach through Christ Community Church, St. Charles, founded a not-for-profit organization called Project 8110 to raise funds for their work in Sierra Leone and, eventually, other underdeveloped nations.

The name comes from a tongue-in-cheek interpretation of Psalm 81:10, which says, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of Egypt. Open wide your mouth and I will fill it.”

With nods to both arms of the ministry, the foundation's tagline is another play on words: “Dental Training with a Vision.”

But Evans and Linder were not the first to have this vision. The idea of teaching lay people to fill basic dental and optometry needs was the brainchild of a Christian ministry called I-Tec (Indigenous People's Technology and Education Center), which also designed the portable dental chair Evans uses in the field.

Enabling dentists to work anywhere in the world, the chair folds down for backpacking and features a utility tray and speed drill that can either run on a battery pack or plug into one of several voltage options.

Linder and Evans are indebted not only to the ingenuity of I-Tec, which was in the news recently for a flying car it developed, but also to the sight program of Lions Club International. The Lions provides Project 8110 with used eyeglasses at the bargain price of about a dime each.

Nearly 4,000 pairs of glasses, categorized by power, size, and designated gender, went along with Linder and Evans for this trip.

“If you need a -1.50 (diopter) power, and you're female,” Linder said, “there will be perhaps 150 to 200 styles to choose from. We want to give you what's going to work best for you rather than a fashion statement, but we realize that you might not use glasses that you don't like.”

It was Evans who first got excited about the I-Tec programs called I-Dent and I-See, and he asked Linder to take on the vision program. That freed the dentist to focus on his students, who are now replicating his teaching with students of their own.

The community dental technicians, as they are called, perform extractions and fillings and are trained to provide care at or above local standards.

“We emphasize all of the basic principles that I follow every day in my practice,” Evans said. “First, do no harm. Also, how to assess the patient, review the medical history, do an exam, diagnosis, treatment plan, proper case selection what you are comfortable treating patient consent, all the proper techniques and utilization of equipment and supplies.”

Sterilizing dental tools is accomplished with the steam produced by heating a pressure cooker over charcoal. Cavities are filled with glass ionomer cement, which Evans said is “excellent for this environment.”

Project 8110 partners with local churches in Sierra Leone, who use the dental and optometry services as an outreach for ministry. One community was so grateful, Evans said, that the church was given land for a building and a field for the pastor to cultivate.

With Evans' and Linder's students already teaching others and a new local Lions Club to sustain the vision program, the job there seems to be winding down. The men are considering taking their dental chair and eyewear to another country, and they couldn't be more thankful for that.

“I've been on these trips before, where we go for a week or so, and we do the treatments,” Evans said, “but the need is so great it feels like you'll never be able to make an impact. But now that we have trained them to provide the care themselves, it's much more rewarding to know that our efforts will continue on in our absence.”

For more information about Project 8110, visit www.project8110.org.