In 1984 I went to the area of Samana (Northern Province) in the Dominican Republic as a tourist. It was my first trip to a third world country. I was very touched when I saw the poor children in the streets selling peanuts, cleaning shoes and just working to gain a living. Although they were working so hard, they were always smiling. When they were smiling, however, I could not help but notice that even at early teenage years they were missing teeth, had gum disease, etc. At the same time I also realized that this problem was wide spread. When I talked to local people and asked them why this was happening, I found out that there was only one dentist in town whose services were too expensive for the poor. Public dental care was not available, therefore, when people had problems they just pulled their teeth at home the old fashioned way by tying a rope to the door handle and closing the door…or if they could afford it, they paid a dentist a somewhat hefty fee. It really touched my heart … I wanted to come back one day and do something for those kids.

I was a dental assistant prior to my trip and in the midst of applying to study dental hygiene. There was a lot of competition and it was a very difficult profession to get into. There were around 2000 to 3000 students for about 16 places and only half of them made it through the program. I thought that if I managed to become a dental hygienist, I would like to work with these Dominican kids and help them to keep their teeth. Even though many had lost some teeth already, they would at least know how to keep the remaining ones healthy.

At that time I was 20 years old. When I got back to Canada from my vacation, I found a letter of acceptance to the best dental program in Canada at that time. It was from Canadore College. I graduated with a Best Clinician award and had many job offers. I worked three different jobs, bought a car, paid off my student loan and paid off my car. After my first year of working I thought that if I did not go to the Dominican Republic at that point, I would probably never go...

I started looking for sponsoring organizations, which was not an easy task. I wrote letters to many foundations and private dentists and they always came back with the same answer: it is a wonderful idea but there are no funds available for such endeavors. I was fortunate to find the Spanish speaking Lions Club that had a foundation called “Bob McCallister Foundation”. I talked to them and they loved my idea. They agreed to support me by applying for a matching grant from CIDA if I raised some money. I though that it was a fabulous offer, so I gave them a cheque for $6,000 that I raised on my own and sure enough they gave me another cheque for $6,000 that CIDA gave to them. I now had CDN$12,000 in my hands and that is how I went on my journey.

During my stay in the Dominican Republic I met some special people who became friends for life. Among them was Felix Jimenez who later became my husband. He ran a hotel in Samana and offered me room and board for free. I worked from the hotel and hired two Dominican nurses who spoke English since I could hardly speak any Spanish. I took some courses but was not quite fluent at that point. I trained the nurses in principals of primary health care. We went to schools, churches and community centers. It was a wonderful experience; however, when the year was over and the money came to an end, I had to go back to Canada. I sadly left the community that still needed my help…I realized that there were people already in pain with a lot of teeth that were damaged and only educating them was not enough. Who could help them? The country needed accessible dental care that they could afford.

So there I was, on my way back to Canada to get a job again. My funds had run out and I my goal was to get some dental equipment donated to start a clinic with the contacts I had made in the Dominican Republic. There were people I had met that belonged to the Santo Domingo Rotary Club. Through the Santo Domingo Poniente Rotary I met Dr. Santana who had a medical office in one of the poor outskirts of Santo Domingo called Herrera. I also met Dr. Ruiz who was a retired dentist and very willing to set up a clinic with me. In Canada, I sent out letters to dentists asking for any equipment that they could donate and shortly after I started receiving some positive replies. I approached one of the doctors I was working for, Dr. Tzvi Rubinger, and he was remodeling his office. He donated the whole set of dental equipment. At that time there was a charter flight with Worldways airlines and they were happy to crate the equipment and transport the donations free of charge. In the Dominican Republic, Felix received the donations without having to pay customs or duties. It was amazing. Today there is tons of red tape at customs. God was overseeing the whole operation, it was meant to be...

So, with the help of Dr. Santana, “Sonrisas-I” clinic, first of many more to come, was opened in April of 1990 in Herrera in a space that was given to us by this Rotarian. It was a very challenging experience. People flocked….kids were treated for free and adults were charged a very low amount. There was a growing curiosity all around the community and more people were coming each day. We worked with volunteers and last year graduating dental students from local universities. It was unforgettable…

There were many people that God had sent my way; among them was Carmen Brito. She was my massage therapist and after spending some time getting to know her, I realized that she had a lot of potential. She was a fast learner although she did not have any formal education. I decided to take her under my wing and teach her basic principles of dental hygiene and how to work in the community. Later I sent her to university where she took a course in dental assisting. Today she is still with us, in charge of the Educational department. In the beginning, Carmen had gone door to door telling people where the clinic was and has also worked in the clinic itself giving patients to be treated lectures in dental hygiene. Today we have a very large educational department with educators in every permanent clinic and in each mobile unit.

Another person who came my way at that time was Maria Magalis Cruz. She was the receptionist in Herrera and is still with us now supervising our clinic in Puerto Plata. I entrusted in her the first clinic we opened out of town and she did a great job. She also helped us in the training of new supervisors. Another back bone of the institution was Regino Almonte. When the Canadian Embassy donated a minivan, we put a mobile chair in it, converting the vehicle into our first mobile unit, which Regino drove to field trips. That was the beginning of our mobile operation and the beginning of Regino’s integration into the “Sonrisas” family. From running errands and driving mobile units, he is now a head of our transportation and technical departments… Regino is very good in fixing equipment and my dream was to find sponsorship and bring him to Canada so he could study how to become a dental technician and properly fix the equipment that we get donated.

This dream has come through. Regino is now in Canada for a second time, perfecting his technical skills and greatly enjoying his duties. Lic. Domingo Valera has become our Administrative Director over 10 years ago and Dra. Rosalys Rosario, our Dental Director – both are still with us doing an outstanding job.

As time went by, others became interested in the project. Among them was Sonia Estrella, psychologist and the wife of a famous journalist; and Rodolfo Espinal, an outstanding speaker, media personality and humanitarian. He speaks 5 different languages and conducts government and non-government functions. So Sonia, Felix, a chartered accountant friend of Rodolfo and Sonia, by the name of Andrea Rosario and myself, founded what is known today as the Foundation for Disease Prevention and Children’s Dental Health “Sonrisas” or simply, Fundacion “Sonrisas”.

Why was the foundation formed? When the first clinic was opened in Herrera, we realized that there was a need for more clinics and a legal body to manage them became a necessity and that is how our foundation was incorporated in 1990 by a presidential decree 192-91. Soon after that I got a call from someone in Moca, which is a small town in the valley of Cibao. Deidania and Silverio Ferrera have heard about my project and called me because they wanted me to open a clinic like that in Moca. I told them that if they found the physical space that I would do my best to get equipment donated and we will open the clinic in their town. Sure enough, they found a location at the local City Hall, Deidania and Silverio paid for the installation of the equipment and “Sonrisas-II” clinic was opened in Moca.

Wile we were in the process of opening the second clinic, we got very disturbing news. Dr. Santana asked us to move out from his Herrera clinic, since he needed space for expansion and didn’t want us to stay there any longer. The thought of the first clinic I opened in Santo Domingo being closed was devastating to me… People had become dependant on our services. Where we going to go? Sonia Estrella told me that I should write a letter to the Dominican President and ask him to give me one of the government built apartments. So I did and her husband took the letter to the Presidential Palace. Then something amazing happened: the letter was taken in on Friday and on Sunday I got a phone call from a friend asking me if I have seen the newspaper? I was one of the people whose name appeared in the morning paper as a recipient of an apartment from the President. It was a three bedroom apartment on the first floor of a government building in Los Rios.

The “Sonrisas-II” in Moca opened up in November of 1991 and the government-donated apartment in Los Rios was also converted in 1991 into a new clinic “Sonrisas-III”. But the fact remained that our first clinic in Herrera needed to be closed down in the area that already had its own patients and the people there were still in need of our services… I thought it over and decided to approach “Plan International”, an international Foundation that had their head office in the same area of Herrera. I explained the situation to them to see if they could help us and they certainly did by donating a house to my Foundation. As a result of this generous gesture, “Sonrisas-I” moved into its own building in Herrera at which time, the Canadian Embassy stepped in and paid the re-installation costs. We happily stayed in Herrera, which was wonderful because the people who already got used to receiving our services kept benefiting from them. And after this small “crisis”, my faith in God became even stronger and I marveled at how God works because out of the threat of losing one clinic, we ended up with three new ones…
So this is how the first three clinics came to be. We did, however, have to find a way to support the project since the children were treated free of charge. We were only requesting about one Canadian dollar, which was equivalent to ten Dominican pesos, as a collaboration fee per visit. During each visit a child would have three, four or five fillings done because we would work in a quarter of a mouth at a time. In other words, if you take a mouth and divided it into four parts, one fourth is a dental quadrant. Basically in four appointments the child’s mouth would be completely fixed and it would cost the child four dollars or forty pesos. Now we had to figure out how to pay the employees and the dentists that would treat children in the morning absolutely free and adults in the afternoon. Having a well established organization we no longer could depend on dental students or on volunteers, we wanted to provide a real professional care to our patients. We established that the adults will pay a small fee for their treatments, which was approximately 40% of what a private dentist would charge. About 50% of this money will become dentists’ salary and in the morning they volunteered their time to work with the kids. The other 50% of what was generated from treating the adults was used to pay salaries for the rest of the employees and to cover all kinds of work related expenses.

As you can imagine it was very difficult to maintain this project with this type of charging schedule since there were a lot of expenses involved. As more and more people read about our work in daily press, saw us on TV or heard about us from word of mouth, naturally a volunteer group was being formed composed of Dominican women and men wanting to donate their time and efforts. The group started meeting in my own backyard planning a variety of fundraising events to help the foundation. It was that money that really helped us to keep going as well as the fact that we did not have to purchase most of the equipment or materials, since I got them donated from Canada. The clinics were so clean and modern, that we had cases of patients turning around and leaving after they walked inside, thinking that they were in the “wrong place” for the rich.

As a pilot project, before expanding so far away from our “home base”, we sent a mobile clinic to Puerto Plata and parked it for one year in one of the parking lots of a large hotel called Playa Naco. That was the first hotel where we started the “collaboration plan” with the mobile clinic. The person who went to supervise it all the way from the Capital, was Maria Magalis Cruz, the same Magalis who started with me as a secretary in the first clinic in Herrera. She first became a supervisor of the clinic in Herrera and then became a supervisor of this clinic. Yvonne Richardson, a dentist who started working with us in Herrera also went to work at the mobile clinic together with Magalis. These two girls took off for an adventure to Puerto Plata and did a marvelous work. They worked for a year providing services in the mobile clinic, hired a local dental assistant/educator named Marisol Mena who is still with us. So, after a year we were looking for a permanent clinic.

In 1994, “Sonrisas-IV” clinic was opened in the City of Puerto Plata. The house was purchased by our foundation with the money donated by American and Swiss tour operators and the installations paid once again by the Canadian Embassy. The equipment installed was collected by me through my continuously growing network of Canadian collaborators. We needed to find more ways of getting money, and with our Playa Naco experience, an idea was born to organize a “certain kind” of a dental plan. We called it a “collaboration plan” and what we did was offer it to private companies such as hotels at a nominal fee of approximately 15 pesos per month per employee. The company would give us an X amount of pesos per month and in return they would be entitled to send a certain number of their employees for dental treatments. The companies that were supporting us were also benefiting their own employees, a perfect combination for both parties. That plan really took off in Puerto Plata. We had a couple of hotels that liked the idea of having their employee’s mouths fixed. As you can imagine working with tourists- healthy smiles and fresh breath are a must…

Later on, we were able to expand again and purchased a house with the help of ADRA Canada and again the Canadian Embassy paid for the installations of the Equipment donated in Canada. With their valuable help as well as thanks to the help from other national and international organizations,” Sonrisas-V” was opened in 1996 in Santiago. Today the clinic is doing well, still growing and getting stronger year by year.

In 1998 “Sonrisas-VI” was opened in Higuey, based in a house donated by the Secretary of the Foundation, Ms. Perla Valdez de Vila. Today the clinic is doing fantastic and is well respected by everyone.

In July of 1998 the Smiles Foundation was officially established in Canada with the intention of supporting its sister foundation in the Dominican Republic. This way we were able to give our own tax receipts to our donors and to have a more solid ground for our network of supporters in Canada. Today Smiles Foundation has the following Board of Directors: I am its president, John DeBoer is the treasurer, Felix Jimenez is the secretary, Ada Nickols, John Popiel and John Howard are the board members. Together we are working to support what Smiles Foundation has become and what we want it to represent in the future for many people in need.

The year 2000 saw the opening of “Sonrisas-VII” in a poor area of Santo Domingo called Pantoja. This clinic was built for us by a community development department of the Dominican government and once again, with the help of the Canadian Embassy and this time German Embassy as well. By the way, the German Embassy also collaborated with the last three clinics by donating generators which is very, very important because there is a great deal of power shortages in the country and generators are incredibly expensive.

In a year that followed, we build a warehouse in the land adjacent to the clinic in order to organize and store all the equipment that we bring donated from Canada. Today “Sonrisas-VII” is the most social of all our clinics, boasting with summer camps, its own dance group and patient volunteer committee.

In 2005 “Sonrisas-VIII” clinic was opened in Villa Mella. This is the outskirt of the Capital and a very poor neighborhood. The land for the clinic was donated by the minister of tourism, Felucho Jimenez. The building was done by a local Engineer Juan Chalas free of charge and our own board of directors, collected the funds and paid for the construction materials. Or future goal is to build a computer school on top of the clinic to have our own Compucom (Explanation will follow). “Sonrisas-VIII” is equipped with the state of the art equipment sent by Smiles Foundation in Canada and its first year of operation is sponsored by ADRA Canada.

Let me tell you now about the mobile clinics: It started many years ago, when we got a van donated by the Canadian Embassy in 1991 and used it to take a dental chair to the schools, churches or community centers outside of the immediate city area. In 1992 a recreational van was donated by the Canadian Foundation for World Development, Mr. and Mrs. Davis. That became our second mobile clinic that originally went to Puerto Plata. After that we have opened a series of mobile clinics. Right now we have five; and they are installed in small used school buses serving thousands of poor men, women and children, providing them with primary health care, dental care as well as education in different areas of preventive health topics such as family planning, disease prevention, AIDS, breastfeeding, etc..

The mobile clinics are used in different areas of the country to do field trips; we take them to companies, community centers, churches, anywhere and everywhere where there is a need. We get constant requests for the field trips and Carmen Brito is the one in charge of their organization. One of these clinics has been working very successfully for the last eight years with the sponsorship of Colgate-Palmolive.

Through the years we have slightly deviated from strict dental care and have expanded into community development. For example, our “Compucom Sonrisas” project teaches troubled youth from poor areas not only how to use computers but also how to prepare health-oriented educational materials. These kids learn about the importance of health and different related issues and topics by producing booklets and flyers, the information that later on is distributed by the educators in all the clinics and in the field trips. Every permanent and mobile clinic has its own educator that works with the community and its patients. The initial funding for this project came from the Presbyterian World and Development organization and Presbyterian churches in Canada. Today this project is directly supported by our own foundation and we are presently collecting funds to build a classroom of our own on top of our new “Sonrisas-VIII” clinic in Villa Mella.

Now I would like to tell you about our supporters. ADRA Canada (Adventist Development and Relief Agency of Canada) has helped us for many years and with that I would like to go back a little bit. When I had come back from my first journey to Samana with the help of Lions Bob McAllister Foundation, the Club had disappeared. So I called CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) to see whom I could talk to and give my report of the work I had done. CIDA was the organization that contributed a matching grant of CAD $6000 dollars to make my trip possible. The person I spoke to said that is was very unusual for somebody to want to give a reports after the host organization disappears. Usually, people are happy when they do not have to report to anyone… After I sent my report to CIDA with the complete accounting and narrative information, I asked if they knew of anyone who would be willing to work with me and help me because I wanted to go back to the Dominican Republic and was hoping to open a clinic there. I was put in touch with Mr. John Howard who at that time was the Executive Director of ADRA Canada. I really would call John Howard my godfather because he not only took me under his wing in terms of helping me get my dream going, but he also taught me so much about life, human compassion, character strength, humbleness and perseverance against all odds… He taught me how to run the project and how to deal with people. He has given me support and guidance that I will be forever grateful for. John is now retired, works as a consultant for ADRA and is a proud member of Smiles Foundation. In 2001 I have nominated Mr. John Howard for the Governor General’s Caring Canadian award which he received with great pride.

My relationship with ADRA started in 1997 and is very strong today. ADRA participates in all the projects we have done so far and without ADRA’s support, input and help we would not be able to be where we are today. In all honesty, “Sonrisas” owes ADRA Canada its success and ability to grow and serve the needy.

Another Foundation that has helped me a lot was Mr. and Mrs.Ken Davis’ Foundation, Canadian Foundation for World Development. They have donated a lot of dental and other types of equipment at the time when I was living in the Dominican Republic and unable to collect or request the equipment myself. They have sent us numerous containers of donations and have been there with guidance and love, patience and understanding. They are very important people in my life who are now retired, but the work they have done is alive forever through “Sonrisas” and other international organizations that they have helped.

A person without whom I never would have been able to be where I am right now, and who helps me today more than ever, is John DeBoer. John is the owner of DeBoer’s furniture and has given us the green light in using his warehouse for storing our donations since day one. DeBoer’s sends their trucks all over Canada to pick up the donations, its employees help me to pack containers and often John pays the cost of the freight. The manager of his warehouse Werner is absolutely amazing. Werner’s help has been outstanding in organizing, programming and planning the shipments and John’s crew is just wonderful. Personally John and his wife Nell sponsored several of our endeavors, like buying tires for our mobile clinics, equipping the new clinic or generously offering to sponsor Regino’s training in Canada. John has never missed any of the opening ceremonies for the inauguration of a new clinic and has even flown in a military aircraft with the Canadian National Defense to bring donations from Canada to the D.R. We are very proud to have John as a treasurer of Smiles Foundation in Canada and in 2002 approving our nomination, John has been awarded Governor General’s Caring Canadian Award. John has become a very dear friend and a person to whom I will be eternally grateful for making “Smiles” a part of his own life.

Canadian Feed the Children is a Canadian Foundation that worked with us for five years and sponsored a community health educational project. They paid salaries of our educators and sponsored educational seminars for our employees. They covered freight for numerous containers with donations destined to the Dominican Republic with food and supplies of medicine and vitamins that we needed at that time to use in our relief programs. With the donations provided by the CFTC we organized field trips for the community development and relief, distributing food and clothing, medicine, soap and vitamins to the poor in diverse areas of the country. When an independent auditor came to see the work that “Sonrisas” did with the help of CFTC, our joint efforts were described as the best used dollars that CFTC has ever spend.

After the clinics were running, I realized that we were running out of equipment and that we really needed many more materials for daily operations of our clinics. We could not buy everything in the Dominican Republic and we didn’t have enough money for it, so I had decided to come back to Canada and opened a Canadian Sonrisas Liason office in 1996 which was the first step towards what today is Smiles Foundation. The purpose for that was to re-establish contacts again with different dental companies and other Canadian manufacturers that have helped me in the past in order to bring donations to the Dominican Republic. In 1998 a non-profit charitable foundation became registered in Canada as Smiles Foundation.

Smiles Foundation is dedicated to giving the children of the developing world the opportunity for a healthier and more fruitful existence. Its primary goal is to offer curative dental treatments and preventative health education to children and adults through the growing chain of permanent and mobile dental clinics in the Dominican Republic, community development projects along with computer education programs for youth. Through its work in the DR, Smiles Foundation would like to guarantee that the marginalized population has equal access to economic and social resources without destroying their self-determination and without exception of race, sex, age, and economic status. Our long term vision is to expand and amplify our community development in the DR as well as introduce our services in other developing countries.

Martha Alejos has been working with us as Smiles Executive Assistant and Yvonne Pitcher as donations coordinator since 1999 on volunteer basis and both are doing a fantastic job. We have been sending between four to eight shipments yearly and hope to continue doing that and more in the future.

A Board of Directors of nine members runs the Dominican Foundation. In the Fundacion para la Prevencion y la Salud Bucal de los Niños, I am the President, Claudina Jimenez de Chalas is the Vice-President, Perla Valdez de Vila is the Secretary, Mayra Guerra de Bruno is Press liason, Virginia Velasquez de Simo, Raul Vila, Alma Portoreal, Milagros Guzman de Acevedo and Raul Vila – members, Clementina Guzman de Ares is the Treasurer of the Foundation. Together we are the people who supervise what Sonrisas is today: use of the funds, daily activities and institutional growth, among others... We meet bi-weekly and Sonrisas has become a very important part of each and every ones lives.

Our volunteer group still is a separate entity with its own president that is elected every two years and its own Board of Directors. Dominican Volunteer group has over 250 members and is working strictly and specifically on fundraising. They organize events like gala dinners, fashion shows, raffles, bingos, theater productions, and so on and so forth and the money raised is given to our Foundation for its projects. Since our “birth” we have grown a lot, matured a lot, and appreciate the people that have worked with us from the very beginning.

We are certainly hoping to keep growing and our goal is not only to expand in terms of having a clinic in every needy area of the country but also to expand our projects into more community development. We would also like to integrate our work with other institutions in the Dominican Republic and overseas, as well as with the Dominican government along with its Education and Public Health sector. We are working on that and one day look forward to cloning the project and taking it to other countries.

Colgate-Palmolive has already cloned our mobile clinic and they have a clinic like that in other countries. We have been requested from different organizations the permission to do the same but we have not said yes yet because I want to make sure that my employees are really willing and ready to go to other countries and implement the knowledge by training others. Proper funding is also necessary to undertake this great endeavor and we are loocking it at the moment. We developed our internal position manual and all our clinics are organized in a very strict and similar manner from the supervisor down. Employees know what they are responsible for and they report to their superiors weekly.

We have a Dental director who takes care on the institutional level of all the dental personnel: hiring, supervision, field trips, material purchase, etc. We also have an Administrative Director who has everything to do with administration of the project and of course an Executive Director who gets a report from everyone else and makes sure everything is running smoothly as well as is in charge of preparing new project proposals. The administration team has monthly meetings in the capital with our Board of directors where all the supervisors attend. It is very important that the institution feels not only that we appreciate our employees but also that we work together. We try to give more and more freedom to every clinic and to every supervisor to do their own promotions. We very strongly encourage them to raise their own funds, to form volunteer groups in their own communities, to do the presentation to the local press and to develop their own ties with the local leaders, churches, businesses and so on.

My vision of Sonrisas tomorrow is not only for more clinics in more communities or in other countries, but also very solid and independent work for every clinic we already have. I want them all to be conscious of being a part of the same institution, having the same goal of bringing bright and healthy smiles to as many needy children as possible. This would be completely fulfilling the mission of my original project that I took as a volunteer in 1987 to Samana that I named at that time: “Brighter Smiles Around the World”.

My personal experience derived from creating Sonrisas and working on it - is incredible. Feeling humble, grateful, and blessed for being able to be God’s instrument to a project of this magnitude is what summarizes in a few words my sentiments. At the same time understanding that visualization that comes with faith and gratitude to the Creator, knowing that everything you ask is already given to you is really a key to successfully doing anything you want to do in life. When we want to achieve something in order to help others, when our desires are absolutely pure, when people around us open their hearts and really want to help - it seems that there are no barriers. Love and faith in my work, appreciation and encouragement from people around me, as well as incredible gratitude for their time and dedication and at the same time sincere gratitude to God for all his blessings are all the answers to my prayers. Faith and loving dedication helped me to do this work and I believe it is all it takes to make any project a successful one and Sonrisas definitely is not an exception.

I like the people who work with me to feel as a part of the project. I also like them to feel that the project is theirs as it is mine because it is their country and their people they are helping. I have seen incredible and truly inspirable dedication and love from so many of our employees and directors that my work takes a completely different meaning…Many of these people have been working with us for years now and when you hear them talk about the project I can tell that it has become a part of their lives. This is what really makes us different from others and this is what makes us successful.

Last year, we won the prize of Brugal Cree en su Gente (Brugal believes in its people). This is a competition that is done by one of the huge multimillionaire companies that produces rum in the DR. Part of their benefits are given to local foundations. They collect a group of the most prominent and respected Dominican people who are the judges and the foundations across the country send application forms throughout the year. Each one of them is investigated in all possible areas and at the end of the year the winner foundation is identified. That foundation gets a prize of 300,000 pesos which is about CDN$30,000 and that money of course has to be used for the betterment of that institution or its expansion. It is very difficult to win the prize because it is a very tough competition. The Foundations that have won in the past, were foundations with over 40 years of social work in the country like the Cancer Institute and the Foundation for Diabetes. However, this past year we won the social service award. We are the youngest institution to have ever won this prize. It is an amazing achievement. Even though we have received a lot of recognition from different Provinces, companies and TV programs, this was very special because this proved to us and to the country that we are outstanding in what we do and I am really proud of my people.

The reward for me in all of this has been to be able to see every time, when I walked into the waiting room the faces of many children patiently waiting to be seen by our dentists. Some were neatly and beautifully dressed while others wore torn clothing. Regardless of appearance, all of them had this beautiful soul just looking at you right through their eyes... When I took my time and stopped to look at each one of them, I always wanted to cry. There were countless emotions stirred inside of me, there were so many feelings of love and gratitude for this amazing opportunity to serve others, this borderless desire to do more, as well as so many questions: Am I doing enough to help the rest of the world? Is this all I can do? How much do I have compare to others that I must, simply must share..?

I understood that it is not a matter anymore of being lucky for what you have - it is a matter of how little we need to be happy, how little we actually need to survive and how much we can do for others. My whole way of looking at life, my whole way of feeling in terms of values and life, in terms of who I am and what I want - turned upside down, reversed from left to right, re-evaluated itself and the process is still going… I can never walk to any of my clinics and look at the children looking back at me and not feel anything. So the biggest reward for me is knowing that right now over a million Dominican people, the majority of them being children, have benefited from the work that started from a little dream. This is much more than any recognition that anybody can strive for, because real recognition has to come from an internal satisfaction based on what we do. I have learned never to wait for people to say thank you, or appreciate what is done for them. Many of the people we work for do not even have the capacity or education to appreciate what they get, they do not even understand what gratitude really is... Real reward comes from knowing that you have done a little bit, that you have given a little bit of your time to bring a difference into the lives of others. I think that if I help one person, if I touch one person and make a difference in their lives then my life is already worthwhile. I have always believed that we all get a chance in life to help others. Whether we take that chance or not is up to us. I also know that when you open your heart and when you give, life gives you back so many times over...

Sometimes I look at my own life, how it all started - how difficult it was for me to get into the dental hygiene program, how I had to hold two jobs to make ends meet. Then I made it, got accepted into dental hygiene program, graduated with honors, got the most fantastic job right after and then this absolutely amazing opportunity to help others came my way... Since then on, my life has been absolutely wonderful. Yes, it has had its challenges and yes there were times when I did not want to continue anymore and even wondered why I even started doing this. But those were only momentary weakness because when I was able to overcome my own ego and my own pain and hurt and look at the larger picture, look at thousands of lives being affected by what I did, I realized that this was not a choice anymore, this has become my life’s mission.

With poverty comes lack of education and very often lack of consciousness. I always thought that people that come from poor families would be people most happy to work with the poor, but that is not usually the case in the Dominican Republic. Usually that kind of people are looking out for themselves and want to better their own lives. If you look for example at who makes up the volunteer group or the board of directors, they are people who are well off and can give part of their lives to help others. That is just a fact of life and by being in the DR, I have come to understand it and learned to live with it.

Many lives were affected and there are more than million stories to be told, but I will tell you only one - about a girl from Puerto Plata. Her name is Ana and when she was a kid she was embarrassed to smile because she had so many cavities. She always dreamed of being a model. But imagine how a poor girl with such bad smile could ever become a model? Well, somebody told her that there was a clinic near by and she came to “Sonrisas-IV”. We fixed her teeth and at the time she had a part time job at one of the small corner grocery stores, nurturing a big dream… The girl grew up with a beautiful smile and guess what? She is a model now well known and respected in the local community and she is so proud of it.

This is just one of so many initially “sad” stories that got beautiful endings, just like fairy tales do. Kids coming from very poor families that had to endure a lot of pain, abuse and suffering finally got the cure. Today those kids can come into “Sonrisas” clinics, improve their smiles and get rid of pain. Their parents can learn a lot about treating and bringing up their children because prevention of woman and child abuse is part of our education program. Many lives have been changed, many lives have been touched... And my personal lesson from it all: when you can help and make a difference in someone else’s life DO IT. The opportunity is definitely worth it.