Jamaican mission trip: insights from Dr. Carney

We all aspire to become dentists, but after graduation our paths will diverge in many directions. My dream is to establish a volunteer dental clinic in the Philippines. As a junior in high school, my family went on a dental mission trip to Manila, Philippines. We brought instruments, a lawn chair, flashlights, and did screenings on children within the basement of a church. This eye-opening experience solidified my commitment to pursue dentistry. Since then I’ve had an un-settling desire to return to the Philippines on my own dental mission. In my second year of dental school, I had the honor and privilege to participate in a Jamaican mission trip through the Christian Dental Society, lead by Drs. Jim Carney from Illinois and Bill Griffin from Virginia. I was inspired not only by the number of lives we touched, but also how established the dental clinic was…