Spring 2010 - Tufts University School of Dental Medicine

The program has more than exceeded
Morgan’s expectations. He says he’s amazed
that the community-based volunteers have
cared for thousands of people. “This model,
with a multiplier effect, has great value in
terms of building capacity at the village
level,” he says. “We think it is a good one
to work with, to find techniques to apply to
other health-care systems.”
Once the villagers in Muchila became comfortable
with the team, they had a request: We
need clean water. “If you want to improve an
overall health outcome, you have to deal with
the water contamination situation and its
contribution to disease,” Morgan says. Soon
he and Gallaba, through Maureen Lombard,
the dental school’s director of clinic operations,
contacted a U.S. Rotary Club that was
doing water projects and linked it with similar
organizations in Zambia. Two boreholes
were drilled, and for the first time, the village
had regular sources of clean water.
Another pressing community issue the
dental professionals took on was the large
number of orphans who needed to be cared
for. Among Zambia’s 13 million people are
some 800,000 children who have lost their
parents to the ravages of AIDS and other
diseases. In Muchila, as elsewhere, they are
usually taken in by local families, which are
often poor. With support from their fundraising
arm, Options for Children, Morgan
and the other health-care providers decided
to subsidize a farm that raises corn that is
sold to benefit the orphans.
“It was sad,” says Morgan. “These orphans
are overburdening so many families in the
village, so we thought with the farm we could
feed them and also sell some of the corn to
buy shoes and enough supplies [for the children]
to go to school. We’d like to expand
that program.”
Muchila’s chief had another request: Help
the village women start a small business
venture. “They are the backbone of the culture,”
says Morgan. “They have the babies,
they raise the families, they work out in the
fields.” The women decided to make baskets
to sell to tourists, and the dental team takes
the baskets to area markets and brings the
proceeds back to Muchila.
“The women say they never thought they
would ever be paid for anything in their
whole lives, so this has been a big boost to
them,” Morgan says. “This has given them a
vision for what they can do.” Next, the dental
team hopes to help the women branch
out into jewelry making. Another task will
be to improve the distribution of the goods
so they don’t have to rely so heavily on the
team to get their products to market.
Even though the Tufts project is still
focused on oral health care, its success in
other areas has been an eye-opener. It has
Temba Mudenda, D71, Zambia’s first native-born dentist, spent his career
spreading the word about preventive care
WHEN TEMBA MUDENDA RETURNED TO ZAMBIA TO PRACTICE AFTER GRADUATING
from Tufts School of Dental Medicine in 1971, he made history. The
country had become independent only seven years earlier, and Mudenda
was the first Zambian dentist.
He’s typically modest about his achievement, having retired from
both his practice and his longtime work as a public health administrator.
Throughout his career, though, he raised standards and sought to
expand access to oral health care in his native country.
Mudenda had first come to the United States to study for his undergraduate
degree at Washington & Jefferson College in southwestern
Pennsylvania, and quickly decided to pursue an advanced degree. “At
the time, the greatest need I perceived in my country was for dentistry,
because there were no Zambian dentists at all,” he says.
When he arrived at Tufts, he didn’t know anyone and was the only
black person in his class. He was assigned a room in Posner Hall, and
then came a knock at the door. It was his new roommate, Jim Case,
D71. “I looked at him and said, ‘You are most welcome. I need a roommate
to tell me a lot of things about Boston,’ ” Mudenda says. “But,”
he adds with a laugh, “he was from California.” They became fast
friends and explored the city together. They remain in touch via email.
When he graduated, Mudenda didn’t have any doubt about where
he belonged. “I am the first born in the family, and in our culture,
there is a lot of responsibility placed on the first born,” he says.
Arriving in Lusaka, the Zambian capital, he faced challenges as a
new dentist, including a lack of equipment. But Tufts had prepared
him well, he says. “They gave you the big black box with all kinds of
things, and insisted you buy the equipment and fill it up, and that
became my savior when I arrived [back home].”
Soon the Ministry of Health assigned him to run a health post in
Livingstone, in southern Zambia near the border of Zimbabwe. He was
the only dentist for hundreds of miles. Initially when patients came
with toothaches, they just wanted the achy tooth pulled. “Now, with
my training, the first thing was to preserve the teeth,” he says. And
after several years, “people would actually come and say ‘filling.’ It
was very pleasant to my ears.”
Promoting preventive care became his mission. He eventually
returned to the United States to earn an MPH at the University of
Michigan, and refocused his career on public health administration.
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