Where There Is No Dentist 2012 15
STORY TELLING—an example
People everywhere have a tradition of teaching with stories. Many of the
things we believe, we learned through stories we heard from parents,
friends, and teachers. This is good, except when a story teaches something
that isn’t true! When a woman gets pregnant, for example, she hears
many stories, and she wants to learn whatever she can from these stories.
Unfortunately, some traditional beliefs about pregnancy are partly
wrong. An example is the belief that one must always have dental problems
during pregnancy.
Here is a story you can tell to help people see that they are partly right about
pregnancy and dental problems, but that there is more to understand.
A Story: Bertine’s teeth
Bertine was the dental worker in her village. She was a young
woman, but the villagers respected her because she was such a
careful worker, and because she knew how to fill cavities and pull
teeth without hurting people. She also spent a lot of time teaching
people how to avoid dental problems. “Clean your teeth every day!”
she often said, at her clinic, at the schools, at village meetings. “Eat
a mixture of foods, especially a lot of fruits and vegetables! Avoid
candy and sweet, sticky foods!”
When Bertine was 23 years old, she got
married and became pregnant. She also
began to have some tooth problems of her
own. She saw that her gums were bleeding
when she cleaned her teeth, and she had
small cavities in two of her teeth. As the
dental worker, she was embarrassed to
have tooth problems, but an older woman
told her, “It’s natural to lose teeth when you
have babies, Bertine. As we say, ‘For each
child, a tooth’.”
One day Lucie, a dental worker from a nearby village, came to see
her friend Bertine. Lucie had a young baby, and Bertine asked her
a lot of questions about babies and about pregnancy. Then Bertine
said, “Of course, l’m having lots of problems with my teeth.” “Why
do you say ‘of course’?” asked Lucie. “Well,” Bertine replied, “For
each child, a tooth.”
“But that’s not true!” Lucie cried. “You think you are having tooth
and gum problems because you are pregnant, but I bet you are
having these problems for all the usual reasons.”