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Kids say “ahhhh.” |
Free Dental Work for Children Project
Herbert Parada is a dentist and attends with UCG in San Salvador, El Salvador. He and 2 other dental students received a complete dental office full of equipment from LifeNets, International (www.lifenets.org) in 2001. Since then, he and the students have been providing at-cost or free dental care to members of their church. He offered to provide a free complete dental screening and cleaning session to every child in his church if Close to You, Inc. would pay a minimal fee of $5 per child. There are approximately 70 children age 3 to 15 in the two congregations in El Salvador. Herbert and his team began work in November, dedicating Sundays to the project. To date, 23 children have received a free dental cleaning and checkup thanks to a generous anonymous donation of $200 to this project. Several children from San Sebastian should receive their treatment in February. Only a handful of these children have had any dental work done in their lifetimes and none have regular dental check-ups. We are hoping by providing this free service that many of the parents will see that their children need dental care and good hygiene and will begin providing this for their children. We also are hoping that many children will be able to keep their teeth into adulthood with the preventative care that will be initiated by this project.
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Kids say “ahhhh.” |
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Dr. Herbert Parada, and students
Veronica Gomez and Raul Ramírez. |
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The dentists at work. |
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Six year-old Francisco Márquez
shows off his clean teeth and bright new smile. |
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Cousins Alvaro and Jairo are glad
their cleaning is over. |
Andrea waits for the dentist to get started
as her mom asks some questions. |