Hundreds of Buddhist monks, nuns and villagers now have a new lease on life after a six-person team of specialists from Squamish delivered much-needed dental work last month to the remote town of Bartsam, Bhutan -a landlocked country in Asia at the eastern end of the Himalaya mountains.
It took seven days to get there, but on April 23 it was all worth it as residents of the small village hidden in the mountains and rarely visited by outsiders eagerly welcomed Garibaldi Dental Clinic dentist Andrew Cheng and his crew.
"Most of these people had never seen a dentist in their lives," said Cheng, who initiated and funded most of the two-week stay.
"There is a dentist in that region, but there's so few people who have actually had anything done."
Cheng, who converted to Buddhism two years ago during his first trip to Bhutan, made a spiritual connection with the country and its ideologies.
A small country that was fiercely defended and never colonized, Bhutan citizens were only introduced to television and the Internet in 1999.
"Their whole concept is gross national happiness and they don't have anything but they're content people," said Cheng. "I think it's quite a worthwhile place to do some good."
The country's current Guru Rinpoche, reputed to be the third reincarnation of a lama also called Guru Rinpoche, is revered throughout the country as much as the Dalai Lama in Tibet, according to Cheng.
Rinpoche ran into Cheng in Vancouver and asked him to help the people in eastern Bhutan in a very remote area.
"He told me the villagers and the monastery in that part of Bhutan have no access to dental services and I said I would go, though it took a lot of out of me of course to say yes because I foresaw the complications.
"But I thought I should do something good and have an adventure."
Cheng and dentist Tony Kwong, dental hygienist Nicki Hamel, business and organization manager Serena Collins, cameraman Greg Bartels and sterilizer and writer Peter Austen set off on the arduous journey.
Austen took notes of the trip and wrote a 10,000-word, at times comical account of the adventure he intends to publish.
"Seven days it took us to get here: 16,000 to Thimpu and another heart-stopping 551 kilometres to Bartsam," he writes. "If the mafia was after you or the gang bosses as in the film Casino, this could have been one of the best places on the planet to hide.
"Not any more as now you know about it."
The crew brought all the tools and equipment they needed from Canada and set up in a small abandoned building - the patients soon started pouring in.
"Serena was at the frontline deciding which cases were the most pressing and setting up appointments," said Austen.
"All we did was fillings and extractions, we were seeing 50 patients a day and doing about 20 surgeries, and we had five days to do the dental work."
The crew worked 11-hour days every day and still there were a few they didn't have the chance to help.
Sterilizing the instruments became a huge problem because the expensive and extremely heavy sterilizer they had dragged from Canada didn't work.
They tried a number of different local distillers only to find none worked so Austen ended up boiling and steaming all the instruments by hand.
"I had to boil 4,000 instruments on my knees with a big pot, and you have to use gloves all the time so I actually used thousands of pairs of gloves," said Austen.
"Each tooth has a different set of pliers.In Bhutan we would be pulling a lot of bad teeth and there would be no time for fancy procedures like root canals. I would be throwing away a lot of blackened, awful teeth."
Cheng said what they did wasn't enough, but that at least it made a difference.
"The people were so grateful and brave," he said. "Even after having numerous teeth pulled out they were still thankful and gracious."
He said he aims to return in 18 months with more dental professionals and his goal is to ultimately open a free clinic and have volunteers go there.
"We're far from that right now but could work towards it," he said. "But next time we'll have to do some fundraising for sure."
Cheng's spouse donated enough air miles to get the team to Hong Kong, and he paid an additional $25,000 US out of pocket for the excursion.
But, said Cheng, it was worthwhile.
We did a lot of good, we had a great adventure and a great life experience," he said.
"Really, we should have done more but we'll plan it out better next time."
