Mike's Dominican Republic Trip

So Eth thought it would be a good idea for me to write up a little post on all of my adventures in the past few weeks. For anyone that doesn’t know, I have been down in the Dominican Republic for 10 days doing dental work and partying. I don’t even know where to begin; the trip was “all inclusive”, including awesome work, killer karaoke, European resorts, tarantulas and all the rice and beans you can eat.

I went down with 14 other dental students from my school, and we flew into and began our escapade in Santo Domingo. We spent our first three days there and went to different places and worked from 8-5 doing free dentistry. We had a great setup, where we were able to do pedo work, endo operative procedures, oral surgery and hygiene. I had the privilege to stick a whole bunch of folks in the face with needles, and then pull out their teeth, I’m sure they loved us. From there we headed up into the mountains to a place called La Vega. La Vega was a lot more rural, equipped with no hot water, non flushing toilets, tarantulas, and of course, our own private club. What Dominican result out in the woods wouldn’t have a club? The work out there was great as well. The people were very appreciative and many walked long distances to see us. It’s amazing the difference it made in some of these folks lives. We worked for two days up in the hills and then headed back down into the city.

Once we got back, the dental part of our trip was over, and we headed out to Punta Cana, to a resort for a few days of vacation. Little did we know, the resort were staying at was well visited by European vacationers. What does this mean? Weird food for one, when I go to a buffet for breakfast, and there is an entire table of some sort of meat jello spread, I tend to not want breakfast. Second problem, everyone on the beach only wears bikini style bottoms, so speedos for men, and bikini bottoms, no tops for the ladies. Unfortunately, only old European women can afford to vacation in the Dominican. We did have loads of fun though playing a ton of beach volleyball. Now it’s all over and I’m trying to catch up with school work, but the trip was well worth it.

This is a buddy that frequented our abodes in La Vega. This guy walked up to us during dinner, but one of the doctors had three in his house!

This was a typical day as far as people waiting to get in and get some work done from us.

I got to give lots of injections and pull a ton of teeth.

Chris, Riley, Tucker and I enjoying a hard days work

The beach was a nice way to end the trip