A Simi Valley couple took their work to Rwanda, a country with few dentists
By Marianne Love, Correspondent
Thomas and Lita Lee had a calling. Go to Rwanda and care for its peoples’ dental and oral health care in a country that has few dentists, where the most common form of dentistry is tooth extraction, and where dental floss is all but unknown.
So in 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, they sold their Simi Valley home and his long-established Granada Hills dental practice, packed their bags and embarked upon their plan to treat Rwandans, educate them about dental hygiene, and set up a teaching school about the art of dentistry.
Three years later the couple, who formed the nonprofit His Hands on Africa — named for a Biblical verse and Thomas’ use of his hands to heal — have been captivated by the Rwandan people and the country’s beauty.
“We are an extension of the hands of Jesus to heal and bless,” Thomas said in a recent Zoom call from Rwanda.
Then he told the story of a dental missionary trip the couple initially took to Rwanda and a woman they met who lived about five hours from the city.
“This patient came in with a very serious dental infection and she wasn’t able to eat for three days,” Lee said. “She literally was steps from ending up in the emergency room and possibly dying. When I treated her, that’s when I realized that if I wasn’t there this woman could have actually died and the child she brought with her could have been orphaned.”
Chatsworth-based His Hands on Africa also focuses on treating and educating the average Rwandan about oral health care. The goal is not to have Rwandans depending on the Lees and their team, but for Rwandans to become self-sufficient in treating their countrymen, especially those in remote areas.
Lee estimates that about 80 to 100 patients are treated daily at his Compassion Community Dental clinic in Nyamata, which opened in 2021.
They take the most serious cases first. Others might have to wait days to be treated.
“I know for Dr. Lee it tugs at his heart that we can have a long line of people, and take care of a hundred of people in a day, but we are turning away about 200 people,” said Keith Gosselin, the nonprofit’s executive director. “That’s just so difficult for him to do, but we only have so many dentists at this point and so many hours in a day. They don’t take breaks. They pretty much go all day.”
In 2022, the team built a clinic in the Ngeruka sector with two chairs, dental supplies and equipment that serves 40,000 people in the sector, and up to 100,000 in outlying villages.
“Doctors provided by the Rwanda government work there,” Lee said. “We have a loose working relationship with this clinic. (The clinic) was in response to a woman who died from a dental infection.”
In 2020, data from the World Health Organization indicated there are two dentists per 100,000 Rwandans. In the U.S., it’s about two dentists per 62 people.
About 70 percent of Rwanda’s 14 million people have never visited an oral health care provider, he explains. Some live in remote villages hours away from the bustling capital of Kigali, the nation’s biggest city. And according to 2016 reports by the Rwandan District Hospital, 18% of morbidity cases across all district hospitals were directly linked to preventable oral diseases that could be stamped out if basic dental care and education existed.
“When I realized (my) hands, and the gift of dentistry I have” Lee says, he decided he wanted to use those hands to save lives. Or as he puts it, “rather than making more money and buying another car and living in a bigger house … not that that’s bad. But I had enough.”
That was the pivotal moment, he says. “There was a certain point when I needed to start sharing something and not just self-indulge in all of the blessings. I went home and started making plans to make the transition.”
The Response
The Lees’ journey started 10 years ago when he was turning 50 and the couple were celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary.
He wanted to celebrate their anniversary by climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro; she wanted a luxurious experience and not a strenuous, grueling hike up a dormant volcano in Tanzania.
When he came up with the idea of an African safari, she agreed.
They had started planning their safari in early 2013 when a Rwandan man came to the couple’s church. He told his story of being 10 years old in 1994 during the Rwandan Civil War and genocide that killed an estimated half a million people. He hid in a closet at the height of the violence, but his father and sister were killed.
“God spoke to my heart,” Thomas Lee said, and the message he heard was, “‘I blessed you so much and have given you everything you ever wanted, and now you are celebrating this great life milestone and I’m completely out of that picture?’ God is like, ‘I need to be in that celebration, so I want you to go somewhere like Africa and use your gifts as a dentist, and bless people on your anniversary trip, and come back’.”
The couple heeded the call and went on a dental missionary trip to Rwanda where they learned about the scarce number of dentists nationwide. They moved there in August 2020, leaving behind Thomas’ father and the couple’s grown children.
Because he had with a father who worked for Korean Airlines, Thomas was used to living in many countries, so the adjustment was relatively easy. For Lita, it was not.
“My move to Rwanda was undoubtedly a journey,” Lita said in a recent email. “It was a crossroads experience of thankfulness, excitement and uncertainty. My desire to be where God wants me to be and be used by Him for kingdom purposes was great, so I was willing to go wherever.”
But, Lita notes, “because the move to Rwanda as a long-term missionary came unexpectedly, for me there was an internal struggle to find my calling and what it meant to leave my children, family, home and some of my desires behind.”
Dental Care in Rwanda
Recent statistics show that in all of Rwanda there are just 69 dentists. The His Hands on Africa team based in Nyamata has six dentists, and three or four more are expected to join in the next few months.
The country has dental therapists to help with emergency toothaches or infections at hospitals, but typically the patient’s teeth are extracted. Most cavities and tooth injuries from a fall or a knock to the face go unchecked and become greater problems.
“Preventive care was nonexistent,” said Roger Joe, owner of Leading Edge Dental in Granada Hills and a His Hands on Africa board member who bought Thomas Lee’s former dental practice.
Joe, who went on a dental mission trip to Rwanda as part of the non-profit’s missionary team, said some Rwandans brush their teeth and their diets don’t consist of a lot of sugar and processed foods. “In that way, they don’t have the kind of problems we have here in the States,” he said. “Their water has treated fluoride in some areas, but in the rural areas there is no fluoride.”
Joe said cavities occur regardless of diet and tooth care because tooth enamel is different person to person, so preventive care and education are important. But in Rwanda “Flossing is unheard of, so food can still get stuck between the teeth. Even though they may brush their teeth, they may develop a cavity.”
He said he was amazed by the gratefulness of the Rwandan people when he was there.
“There wasn’t any bitterness or hatred” despite the genocide during the war, he said. “I thought there would be some kind of traumatic aftermath … but the people were kind and generous and grateful, and I found that to be really neat considering the history they went through.”
His Hands on Africa today and the future
Today, three years after the Lees left Southern California for Rwanda, a team takes a mobile clinic into Rwandan villages where patients would never have access to dental care, and treats 80 to more than 100 patients per day.
His Hands on Africa has taken on a holistic approach, arranging U.S. dental mission trips to Rwanda, helping train the next generation of Rwandan dentists, and building wells to provide clean water. One of the foundation’s goals is to create sustainability, so that Rwanda is not reliant on charitable organizations.
The foundation’s plans include creating a two-year residency program to train four Rwandan dentists per year. Meanwhile, Lee and volunteer dentists are training Rwandan dentists who recently graduated how to perform some of the more elaborate procedures.
The next project, the cornerstone of Hands on Africa’s organizational growth, is the HOPE Dental Center, a training center in Rwanda planned for 2023-2024. It will include private clinics and teaching clinics, a training lab featuring mannequins and models so students can hone their skills, and a dental laboratory to make crowns and dentures. They plan to create satellite clinics to serve far-flung villages.
The former San Fernando Valley couple and the larger team will continue fulfilling their calling and sharing their knowledge so Rwandans can take up the battle themselves. They are focused on helping create a future in which Rwandan children and adults no longer face the sole choice of getting teeth pulled after their routine cavities turn into devastating illnesses.