A Close- Up Look At People Who Matter : Dental Clinic Volunteers Save Smiles

Seven-year-old Brenda had a serious face to hide two teeth ravaged by decay.

“Heavy blanket,” said dental assistant Jane Kelley, explaining the covering she was placing on the child to protect her during the X-rays of her teeth. Carlos Pujol, a volunteer patient coordinator, used soft, reassuring tones to explain the procedure in Spanish.

Everyone but Brenda stepped out of the room at the renovated dental clinic at MEND, or Meet Each Need with Dignity, while the girl’s mouth was X-rayed.

“The thing about a hole that big is I know I can’t fill it,” said Woodland Hills dentist David Campbell, after examining one tooth. The other tooth was worse, he said, but the nerve damage was so extreme that Brenda didn’t feel the pain any longer.

The child was scheduled to see an oral surgeon to have both baby teeth removed. Permanent teeth will eventually grow in, Campbell said.

Campbell saw seven patients last Friday, ranging from a 56-year-old Mission Hills woman on disability to 4-year-old Anna, who had an infected baby tooth that Campbell had to extract.

The clinic reopened last Friday after major remodeling that had begun in December. “I didn’t like not having the service for that period of time,” said Sandra Bihlmeyer, MEND’s program director. “It really feels good to get it going again and have our volunteers back.”

MEND, a Pacoima-based social service agency, had started a $1-million renovation of its entire building in March 1995. Before the project, the group’s medical and dental clinics were housed in one room. In a hallway, patients signed up for services.

Now, the upgraded medical and dental clinics are separated by a furnished and carpeted waiting room. “Now they can come in and sit down and it is so much nicer for them,” Campbell said. As a dental student, he had used a folding chair and a card table when he did dental work on migrant workers.

“There is no other facility like MEND’s,” Campbell said. The program asks for only a $2 donation from patients, many of whom have never before seen a dentist. “What they are offering to the public is unheard of elsewhere.”

The dental clinic helped MEND win a 1996 Community Partnership Award from The Times Valley Edition. Six volunteer dentists from the San Fernando Valley Dental Society work half-day shifts once a month, but more dental assistants are needed, Bihlmeyer said. Unlike Campbell, most volunteer dentists must work alone.

The months of renovation boosted the clinic’s waiting list to more than 200. But since the population that MEND serves is often transient, Bihlmeyer said she thinks many of those will be hard to reach.

“I try to get the people here who need help,” said Pujol, a retired Lockheed painter from Mission Hills who confirms appointments, often by going to see families that have no phone.

“You have a satisfaction in doing this,” said Pujol, who uses Spanish and a pleasant manner to put patients at ease.

“I’m going to do volunteer work here,” declared Bobbie Saptler, a Mission Hills woman on disability for 12 years who had three teeth fixed recently by Campbell. “All over the country, we need people to do more things like this.”

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