Helping Others in Irvine & Around the World Is Important to Us

Helping People, All Over The Continent

People ask what hobby I have. It's kind of an unusual one. We do more dentistry. Now we've coordinated and started our own nonprofit, Dental Care for Children. Been doing it for almost 30 years now. And I was just looking at the numbers. We've seen over 30,000 patients, 310 free clinics in countries around, but basically we go into areas and we started going off to orphanages in Mexico and we'll drive down and I have dental students helping from four or five different dental schools. Dentists come and volunteer. Matter of fact, the State of California even allows us to give continuing education credits to dentists when they need to get their license renewed. They can come volunteer with us in the US, internationally, and get credits for license renewal. It's very gratifying. I tell people to come with us, go with us and change a life and might even be your own and you can close your eyes when you get home for months later, you'll see the faces of those kids.

So we go to Mexico. We also have a couple orphanages in Haiti which is a tough, tough environment and we've been going there and we figured out how to do this and we can do it remotely. Dentists don't travel light. We got a lot of equipment. We have a truck and you can go to our sister website for the nonprofit, dentalcareforchildren.org, and get a feel for what we do. So we take dentists, we take dental assistants, dental hygienists, and we have some lay people that we've trained up to run sterilization, to help load and unload and set up the equipment. And we work closely with a couple of different rotary clubs and do clinics with US dentists, Mexican dentists, US Rotary, Mexican Rotary, US dental students and Mexican dental students. We have found that the dental students fight for these jobs.

I kind of feel like Tom Sawyer. I'll let you help me paint my fence. We have a hundred apply for 20 slots. And what I like about it is not only do we help these people, but we're actually helping the dental students and they gain valuable experience, but they also get a feel for the commitment to serve their community. And I often encourage them, when you graduate, come back. We love having you, but always do something to give back in some way. And yeah, they're like nieces and nephews. I go to their dental school graduations. One of the most flattering things, guy insisted on introducing me to his family and says, “I want you to know probably one quarter of what I learned at school, I learned on these trips.”