The Story Of My Teeth
As a child growing up in England, I remember my mother saying, “You must chew your food thirty-two times” and never thought to ask why. Why thirty-two?
It was not until many years later that I discovered the significance of this number when I learned that an adult human has thirty-two teeth. Like most kids, I dreaded the annual visits to my dentist and this fear was in no way allayed after one particular visit which left me feeling more like I’d been to the butcher!
When I reached adulthood, with my full complement of thirty-two teeth, my first major dental problem occurred when I was working in Papua New Guinea. During my time there, I flew to Mt. Hagen, a remote town in the Highlands, to witness the annual Sing Sing. The flight was operated by Ansett Airlines and I have little recollection of the actual flight except that it was rather crowded and somewhat bumpy! On arrival in Mt. Hagen, I discovered that my sleeping bag and small suitcase containing everything for my 4 day stay had gone missing. It was never recovered. This meant that I had nothing except the clothes I was wearing and a small shoulder bag containing my air ticket, my camera and a few other bits and pieces.
The town of Mt. Hagen in 1968 was of modest proportions and offered no more than basic amenities. I recall there being no hotel, no shops, and no cinema in fact, not much of anything. Yet this was the location for one of the most important and highly anticipated annual events in the PNG social calendar – the inter-tribal sing-sing. Many local people from a wide area would spend days trekking from their villages across wild terrain in order to take part in this festival of song and dance. The first sing-sing had been held only a few years previously and was an initiative of the local missionaries who saw it as an ideal way to foster inter-tribal contact and lessen the occurrence of lethal warfare that often erupted between these fierce people.
Without my luggage and nowhere to buy basic necessities to replace what had been lost, I found myself depending on the kindness of other people for things like a blanket to keep warm at night as we visitors were billeted in the local school hall and slept on hard wooden floors. I soon came to realise the discomfort of not having the other things one is used to in the civilised world, simple things like a toothbrush and toothpaste. This was especially annoying when, after eating some raw coconut, I found a tiny sliver stuck between my front teeth and, try as I might, I was unable to dislodge it. The idea of not being able to brush my teeth for four days was unappealing to say the least but one that I just had to accept.
When I did return to my home base in Port Moresby after experiencing one of the most unique events in the world, one of the first things I did was brush my teeth and finally managed to dislodge the offending coconut. The second thing I found I had to do was buy a bottle of body lotion from the chemist as my whole body was infested with lice and itched like crazy! I realised that, in my eagerness to get up close and photograph hundreds of wonderful images of tribespeople in all their finery of furs and feathers, I had inadvertently picked up their lice and wherever I had hair, I had lice!
Fast forward two years and I’m now working at a new job and stationed in East Africa, Mozambique to be exact, but the legacy of those four days in the remote PNG Highlands comes to haunt me. No, not the lice but the realisation that four days of not brushing my teeth all that time ago had started a slow, insidious spot of decay behind the front teeth where the coconut had been stubbornly lodged. I began to experience excruciating toothache in my upper front jaw and, desperate for relief, I prevailed upon a local mixed race friend to help me find a dentist who could come to my rescue. I guess having dental work done in a third world country is not the ideal scenario but I was in so much pain and didn’t have the time to travel to South Africa for treatment.
“Don’t worry, I have a friend who’s a very good dentist,” Costa assured me. “He’ll fix you up in no time.”
“Where did he train?” I asked, trying not to display the distrust that was nagging at me.
“No idea but he’s very good.” I looked at Costa’s choppers and immediately felt assured. In fact, I had never seen a more perfect set of teeth in anyone. Even, white and dazzling bright, they looked almost too good to be true. “How often do you go to him?” I asked.
“Me? No, I’ve never been to a dentist in my life,” was the incredible reply.
Costa introduced me to Themba his dentist friend the very next day. He was a huge giant of a man, not at all what I’d been expecting. Why do we always seem to form mental images of people and places based on what we assume them to be like? I had been expecting a small gentle figure rather like Ghandi and what do I get? I get Mike Tyson!
I guessed Themba to be in his early forties so I’m quickly calculating how many years he’d been practising before getting his hands on me. The surgery was two small rooms on a first floor in a dusty back street of downtown Lorenco Marques. It was clean enough and tidy though sparsely furnished. A white plastic curtain screened the dentist chair from the rest of the main room and trays of instruments were covered in crisp white linen cloths. I just hoped that the other equipment included an efficient autoclave!
Themba, though resembling Mike Tyson, actually had the gentle manner of Ghandi and we were soon chatting amicably. He invited me to take a seat in the dentist chair, which looked rather like something rescued from a second hand shop, and asked me to describe the problem. After a thorough examination he confirmed my fears that there was extensive decay at the back and below the gum line of the middle right front tooth and that it would have to come out.
“Does this mean I’m going to be walking around with a big gap for all to see?” I asked.
“Well, yes, for a while but we can do something about that. Before the extraction, I can take an impression and have a partial denture made up for you. You’ll have to come back in a few days to have it fitted and make sure everything is ok.”
And so another chapter in the story of my teeth was written. Themba proved to be excellent at his craft and I left Africa several months later with my smile intact.
I had decided to return to England to visit the family I had neglected for the past six years and my visit ended up lasting several months. During that time, I took advantage of the NHS and went to the local dentist for a check-up.
“Where’d you get the denture done?” asked the dentist with a bemused look and a thick Scottish accent. I related the whole story about PNG and Mozambique and Themba. He nodded and said the work was ‘unusual’ but if I was happy and it was doing the job then all was fine.
I eventually organised myself to do what I had always intended and re-emigrate to Australia. My mate from Mozambique, Costa, had come over to the UK for a holiday and decided he wanted to see the Great South Land too and asked if he could travel with me. ‘Why not?’ was my reply. So, after organising his visa and all the paperwork, we flew into Sydney in early 1971.
I had friends in Queensland who were prepared to offer us a roof over our heads until we could find work and a place to call our own so we took a connecting flight to Brisbane.
A year later and we are both employed as factory hands in an East Brisbane factory manufacturing fridges and washing machines. We were grateful for the accommodation offered by my old friends but they lived in the outer southern suburbs and we realised that the commute to work and the fact that we were doing shifts made life difficult so we found a small flat to share not far from the factory and moved there.
One day I announce to Costa that I’m going to make a dentist appointment as I’m well overdue for a check-up.
“You should go to,” I say.
“Why? There’s nothing wrong with my teeth,” he retorts.
“That may be true but you know what we say in English, ‘Prevention is better than cure.’ And your diet has changed since you left Mozambique so it might be a good idea to get a check-up.” He couldn’t argue with that.
Since Costa’s command of English was still rather basic, I decide to make appointments for the both of us for same time at a surgery that has two dentists working together. This way I can be there to answer any questions that the dentist might have on his behalf. The surgery is in a converted Queenslander with the two dentists, each working in separate rooms on either side of the central hall. We each go in to our respective dentist at the same time and within a minute, Costa’s dentist comes into where I am having my check-up and says to his colleague,
“Mate, you’ve gotta come in here and look at this. I’ve never seen teeth like this before!” I smile to myself in the mirror and display Themba’s gap!
“Well, that’s something I’ll never hear about my own teeth,” I think.
But now, another forty years down the track and with maybe only twenty of my original thirty-two teeth surviving, and Themba’s false tooth long gone, replaced by an expensive implant along with most of its upper neighbours, I’ve come to realise that the story of one’s teeth is the story of one’s life, or can be if you think about it enough!