Northamptonshire dentist completes charity trip to Mozambique

The children of an experienced dentist helped to remove teeth and apply anaesthetic during a charitable excursion to Mozambique.

Dr Vivak Shah and his children Arjun, 12, and Aryan, 10, treated 200 patients daily on the two-week trip.

The Northamptonshire family, who stayed in the coastal town of Vilanculos, said they had to gain patients’ trust.

“Every day was a different adventure; we would go out to different villages every day,” Dr Shah said.

The dentist, who is based at Saving Smiles’ practices in Rushden and Weedon Bec, said travel could involve road journeys taking two to three hours, and speedboats.

He told BBC Radio Northampton there was a generational gap among the patients, with older people having better teeth thanks to eating a more “authentic” diet, whereas youngsters showed more signs of decay.

“The big issue is the people there don’t really trust people that are coming out,” Dr Shah said.

“They don’t know if we’re going to give anaesthetic, whether we’re going to take teeth out fully or whether we’re going to break teeth.

“But once they got to know what we were doing, the number of people each day grew and grew and grew.”

Dr Shah said he informally trained his children at home to act as his dental nurses so they could safely join him on the trip to east Africa.

Between them, they helped to remove teeth and inject anaesthetic into patients.

“We were inspired by quite a lot of the dentists we met,” Dr Shah said, adding some were in their 60s.

“It was lovely because you get to meet very similar, like-minded people and they had such a great time,” he said.