Connecticut Mission of Mercy: The Wait, the Line, the Need

by Dan Tapper

The rain hadn’t started quite yet around noontime in Bridgeport, CT last Thursday, but the sky was showing it could happen at any minute. There was a steely pall and a grim chill that spoke more to March than to the early summer day it actually was.

Beth Carter was ready, rain or shine. The New York resident was going to get her ailing teeth fixed, no matter what. She was here, first in line outside the Webster Bank Arena, and doors to the free Connecticut Mission of Mercy (CTMOM) dental clinic would be opening in just…18 more hours.

To Beth, it didn’t matter. She was here. And she was prepared to wait.

“I missed last year’s clinic by one day. There was no way I was missing this year’s,” the Westchester County, NY resident said with a smile. “The cost of dental work is so expensive – I’ve been planning for this since last year!”

Beth sat there, the only one in line until about 1:30 pm last Thursday. She had a chair and books and snacks and blankets. She chatted with reporters who were on-hand to cover the clinic’s setup, she talked with and charmed volunteers who stopped out frequently to check on her.

By 4 pm Beth had about 15 new friends on line with her, ranging in age from early 60s down to less than a year old. By 6 pm the number grew to 25. It was raining now, but the Webster Bank Arena has an overhang by the front door that runs about 100 feet long and 30 feet out. Organizers figured that up to 200 people could stay dry under there.

They were right – by 2 am more than 200 people were in the line, waiting for the doors to open in four hours, all keeping dry. Waiting for the free dental care that was there for them inside – free cleanings, fillings, extractions, x-rays, root canals, oral surgery; basically anything they needed. They could even get partial dentures made for their front teeth. For free.

The line was sleepy but friendly. They huddled under the overhang as the rain fell and fell. Volunteers brought them water and chatted with them. The Red Cross set up a truck to hand out free coffee and snacks. As the rain pounded the arena’s plaza and the line swelled to 350, some unfortunately standing in the rain now (all would soon be brought inside to stay dry while waiting), there was still an hour to go before the doors opened. And the line kept growing – patient and friendly, but deeply in need of dental care, of relief from tooth pain.

That line. That wait. This is the face of dental care in America. This is the picture of the need.

***

America’s Mission of Mercy began in rural Virginia in 2000. A group of dentists got together decided to set up a charity event to help people of that area receive the dental care they so badly needed. That was the first Mission of Mercy free dental clinic ever held.

Connecticut was just the 7th state to jump on board when it held its first CTMOM in April 2008. It was held in the quiet middle class town of Tolland, 25 miles east of Hartford and one town over from the University of Connecticut’s main campus. It’s not exactly the middle of nowhere, but it’s indeed a stop on the way. That year, in pouring rain that dwarfed even what was seen this year in Bridgeport, hundreds of people lined up overnight to get in. All told that first two-day clinic treated 1,200 people with about 75 dental chairs. It was a big start.

The next year in New Haven (home of Yale University but also filled with, like this year’s host city of Bridgeport, much poverty) that number swelled to more than 1,800 and the number of dental chairs to more than 100 and more than 1,000 volunteers on-hand.

By the time the 5th annual CTMOM rolled around last year in Danbury in the far southwestern corner of Connecticut, just across the border from New York, the picture was a familiar one. That line. All those dental chairs. More than 1,500 volunteers. The need. The need remained as visible as ever.

And it’s growing nationally. By this year 26 states now host them. America’s Mission of Mercy, based in Kansas, is the organization that sends support and materials to the states in the form of four tractor-trailers, filled with dental chairs, pumping and filtration systems and everything else needed to create the infrastructure of a full functioning dental office.

It takes one full truck to outfit the Connecticut Mission of Mercy. Setup happens in a day – really in about eight hours. We watched with amazement while the empty floor of an 8,000-seat sports/concert arena was transformed, bit by bit, into a 120-chair dental office. Rows and rows of chairs for general dentistry popped up. Pipe and drape cordoned off special areas for numbing, oral surgery and children’s dentistry. This was an operation as technologically advanced as an dental office in the country – there was nothing makeshift or temporary looking about it. And it literally went up before our eyes.

***

The numbers generated by the Connecticut Mission of Mercy are staggering. A quick glance:

2,100 – The number patients served this year
1,500 – The number of volunteers on-hand (Fifteen hundred – think about that number for a minute)
120 – The number of dental chairs
300 – The number of dentists working on-site, taking the day off as well as donating their Saturday.
$1.35 million – The amount in free dental care given out
2 – The number of days in which this all takes place
365 – The number of days it takes to plan the Connecticut Mission of Mercy

The Connecticut Mission of Mercy is a wonderful event, an inspiring event. Every Mission of Mercy held around the country is. But when all is said and done, it’s charity. And charity, as we all know, is no substitute for a comprehensive dental health care policy.

Dental health is general health – the two are inextricably linked. Dental decay is preventable, but it is also prevalent. Heart disease, diabetes, low birth-weight among babies – this are byproducts of poor dental health. Conversely, good dental care makes a healthier body. It also adds to a person’s confidence and demeanor. Who wants to go to a job interview afraid to smile, or in pain? Who wants to exist like that for even five minutes? But people do, year-round.

That’s why beyond the MOM clinics, when the trucks are loaded back up and the chairs and pipes and equipment are all off to their next destination, the dialogue must continue on how to find a more permanent solution for the dental crisis currently hitting our nation. Connecticut is the richest state in the richest nation in the world. Yet hundreds of thousands of people here lack access to adequate dental care. Lawmakers, the dental community, insurers, businesspeople, health advocates, community leaders – they all need to be at the table, working on a long-term solution.

Until then, we wait for charitable clinics such as CTMOM to roll around. Like Beth Carter and her hundreds of new friends sitting in that line, we wait. We wait with hope, with patience and maybe even with a smile on our faces.

But still, we wait.

Dan Tapper is a public relations professional in Connecticut with the firm Sullivan & LeShane Public Relations, Inc.. CTMOM has been a client of his firm since 2008.

Art by Chris Gugliotti

Ah, June…that lovely time of year when mothers everywhere are driven to a frazzle by endless activities, gatherings, ceremonies, and general running-around. I guess I’ve been maybe a bit…distracted?…lately? Dithered? Headless-chickened?

At least so I gather from the moment I had with my eerily perceptive seven-year-old this morning.

“Mommy, will you come outside with me for a minute?”

“Okay,” I toss over my shoulder, en route to the room with the printer. “Just let me do this one thing—” which of course turned into three things. Maybe four. Half a dozen max.

Finally, though, I told her, Okay, how about now. She took me by the hand and led me to the backyard. Paused at the edge of the lawn, looking out across the grass at the butterfly garden, the bird feeder, the trees beyond.

“See,” she said solemnly, all business, “I was noticing our mornings have been grumpy this week. People have seemed…tense. Now: listen. What do you hear?”

I’m breathless. She has this preternaturally serene expression on her usually animated little face: positively Charles Wallace.

“Birdsong,” I venture. Fluty house sparrows, a persistent scrub jay, the operatic mockingbird.

“Right,” she nods. “The music of nature.”

I’m hiding a smile. She’s so very serious. Any minute now she’ll call me Grasshopper.

“Now breathe deep,” instructs this tiny guru. “What do you smell?”

It’s a rare overcast day. You can hear the grass singing to the clouds, yearning for rain.

I’m feeling very humble now. “The good smell of green growing things?” I murmur.

“Yes,” says the seven-year-old. “Life.”

Point taken, Master Po.

I have a new corner over at GeekMom: I’ll be hosting live interviews with other authors and artists via Google Hangout. Eep! Recorded live! Sometimes books fall on your head in the middle of the interview! (True story.)

Here’s Episode One: an interview with the awesome Quinn Cummings about her new book, Pet Sounds (and a whole lot of other stuff). Bonus: lightning round questions contributed by my children.

I hope you’ll click over to take a look. I had the best time chatting with Quinn.

I’ve really dropped the ball on my reading notes, these past few months! I’m looking at my GoodReads list and ouch, I must have missed logging some things, because there’s only one novel listed for May. That can’t be right. Let’s see, it’s definitely missing The Scent of Water, which I reread in early May. That’s one hitch with GoodReads; if you’ve entered a book in the past (I read it last year), there’s really no way to re-list it except to change the date altogether.

Well, notables of the past couple of months:

The Scent of Water (reread)

Pilgrim’s Inn, also by Elizabeth Goudge, immediately afterward. I was so in the mood for more Goudge, and this was a really lovely book, but I rather wish I’d had more time between the two; their themes are so similar, and the assortments of strong and quirky personalities. And the importance of houses, specific living, breathing houses who have to be counted as characters in their own right. (Like L.M. Montgomery, Goudge will ruin you for houses! The boxy mid-century bungalows of my neighborhood seem blank and bland to me after a dose of Goudge. No ‘lashings of magic,’ to borrow Jane of Lantern Hill’s phrase. No quaint spool beds or cockeyed chimneys, no breathtaking views, no hidden chapels or wide, welcoming stairways. No secret lanes anywhere! Although you can pretend them into existence if you try…)

Crop out the houses and the runoff drain between two streets becomes a secret path…

Anyway, I’m teasing a bit, but I really loved Pilgrim’s Inn and am glad I still have so much Goudge left to read for the first time.

Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York—a complete change of pace! A collection of gorgeously written, jangly, quick-beating essays about New York City. Made me ache, I missed the city so much. Sent me careening right back to my beloved Helene Hanff: Letter from New York, 84 Charing Cross Road (which is about NYC as much as it’s about books and kindred spirits). I bounced back and forth between Whitehead and Hanff, gulping great chunks of each.

Do you know, I read this way more and more these days…a chunk of one book, a chapter of another, back and forth, six or seven at once, wantonly, greedily. I mostly finish things, but sometimes I don’t. A few of the things I’m in the middle of this very moment: Wild by Cheryl Strayed; How to Watch Television (a new book coming from NYU Press, and it is CAPTIVATING ME); Blackout by Connie Willis (I never finished that one a couple of years back; picked it up again recently)—all of them active reads, all of them gripping me, each of them begging a free afternoon.

(Will I ever finish Blackout? Will I reach the point where I can’t possibly put it down? That point usually comes sooner for me in a Willis novel.)

Back to the books that occupied my spring—only now it’s gotten late, I’m not going to finish this list. I have to add Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness. I’ve been reading a story a week, more or less…she’s so sad and rich, I have to take her slow. I read her sentences like each one is a small poem. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild begins with a harrowing cancer story—I won’t give too much away—and a woman who’s just been told she has terminal lung cancer, maybe a year to live, asks her doctor if she can still ride her horse. But they’re offering radiation to shrink the tumors along her spine, and the doctor says her spine will be so brittle, a jolt could shatter it to dust. That’s how my heart feels after an Alice Munro story, like one more sentence would crack it to splinters.

From Munro I pendulum to the things I’m reading my children: Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, Brambly Hedge (on endless repeat, it seems), Odd Duck.  Laughter glues me back together. But I can’t do without the shattering books. I think you come back together a little different, every time.

“To be perfectly honest, Ticky,” said Professor John, “I do not care for grandfather clocks as a rule. They are so very tall that one can never look into their faces and see what they are thinking. But your grandfather must be a very special clock, and it is always a good thing to have an ancestor who lives in a castle.”

—The Very Fine Clock by Muriel Spark, illustrated by Edward Gorey (1968)