Dental doctoring in the Dominican

A Woodmere-based oral surgeon and his son, a fourth-year dental student, were part of a group from Tufts University’s School of Dental Medicine that traveled to the Dominican Republic to provided dental care to more than 200 orphans this summer.

Dr. Leonard Schiffman of Hewlett and his son, Michael, along with several Tufts students and Dr. Gerard Kugel, associate dean of the dental school, arrived in San Pedro de Macoris on Aug. 29 and headed to the Hogar Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos, an institution that houses 204 children, from babies to teenagers, who have been orphaned and abandoned throughout the island nation.

Dr. Schiffman, the director of the Department of Dentistry and Oral-Maxillofacial Surgery at Peninsula Hospital, had two motivations to be part of the team: His son was going, and the group discovered last year the significant need for an oral surgeon.

“I was told it would be real hot, to get a lot of shots and redo my polio [vaccine],” Schiffman said in the waiting room of his Franklin Place office as he recounted his weeklong visit.

And those were not the only challenges that Schiffman, his son and the team would have to deal with. In a country where the per-capita annual income is just above $8,000, items taken for granted in the U.S. are hard to come by.

That includes clothes. The children who live in the orphanage receive a shirt, pants and shoes, and get “new” ones only when they’re passed down to them, Schiffman said. But these children are better off, than those outside the orphanage, who have even less and are envious of the ones inside the institution’s walls.

“The roads are not paved and are covered with cow dung that the children outside the orphanage walk through in their bare feet,” Schiffman said, adding that “falling rainwater is cleaner than the water that is drunk.”

The orphanage had electrical power only from 10 p.m. to 10 a.m., and then had to use a battery-operated generator. When the power was out, medical instruments had to be washed by hand.

“It was very challenging, and we were faced with a complete lack of space,” said Michael Schiffman. “You were doing a dental extraction in a folding chair.”