Day 3- Monday

We had to wake up at 6:45am for breakfast at 7:15am. Breakfast was banana pancakes and eggs== yummmm! We left Rapaco at 8:00am to go to our first dental brigade!! It was only about 30 minutes away- Sabana Redonda with Penn State Global Medical Brigades. The way we traveled everywhere on our trip was in el busito (a van) with Churri as our driver, who is the sweetest and most awesomest person/triage/security guard ever! We always felt safe with him around and he always helped us out if we needed anything. There were 13 people, including me, in the dental group and we had a global brigades leader- Kate, who was also awesome, a lot of fun, and helped us out whenever we needed her. When we got to the brigade site, we had to set up our room, which was one of the classrooms in the community-- the kids loved us because they didn't have school for the day! For the morning shift, I was on restorations. Restorations is the filling station and I got to learn the process pretty quickly by helping out the dentist, Adan. I got to give the anesthesia myself with was so awesome! I also got to hold the blinding blue light on the tooth after Adan drilled the tooth, put acid on it, bonded it, and put constructive glue on it. I was surprised with how much we were able to do within the first few minutes of working as dentists, but I loved it. We ate lunch around noon and I ate a PB&J with chips, which is what I ate everyday for lunch. After lunch my job was triage. In this station I filled out forms about the patient's history and what was hurting them. This was kind of difficult because I'm not fluent in Spanish, but Churri helped me out. We left the brigade around 4 after we had assisted all of the patients. We stopped by our gas station to get some wine to mix with the fruit we bought the previous day in the town and we made sangria! We only let it sit for a few hours while we were at dinner, showering, and meeting, but it was still pretty good. Dinner was around 6 and we ate ground pork, green beans, rice, avocado, pineapple, and tortilla. After all of the UNC brigades staying at Rapaco were done with their meetings, we had a huge dance party with lots of alcohol, drinking games, and even the dentists joined in on the flip cup! Global Brigades staff isn't allowed to drink at Rapaco but they wanted to join in on the fun so they played flip cup with water and gatorade.. it was a very fun night. We went to bed early, around midnight, because we knew we had to get up early the next morning.