Haiti Medical Mission

When Bishop David Talley was pastor of St. Thomas Aquinas, (then Monsignor Talley), he asked dentist Lori McMurray to consider doing a dental mission in Haiti.  She had no idea what she was getting into.  “I thought maybe we would have 30 people,” McMurray said.  But what she found on her first trip in 2007 was overwhelming.  “When we got there, all these people started lining up, and I looked at the amount of anesthetic that we had and I thought, oh my gosh, what are we going to do?”  With help from the clergy at our sister parish, St. Martin, McMurray was able to obtain additional anesthetic that enabled her to treat more than 200 patients.

Since 2007, Dr. McMurray has traveled with other parishioners to Haiti every year except for 2010, the year the earthquake struck the island nation.  McMurray says each visit reveals more of the same.  “There’s not a lot of food there and sugar cane is very plentiful so they chew on sugar cane which is very bad for teeth and so they have very bad tooth decay.  Kids who are eight years old are already losing their eight- year molars.”   Because of the lack of equipment, McMurray treats the patients by extracting their teeth.   She says she would like to be able to purchase a dental unit that would allow her to do fillings instead of  taking teeth out.  The underlying need, McMurray says, is for education.  “There’s a need to really get these children educated in the schools.  They had no idea how sugar is related to tooth decay.”  

In 2010, Dr. McMurray moved from Georgia back to her home state of Michigan, but she continues to accompany members of the parish Haiti committee on their yearly dental mission trips.  That is due in part, she says, to a calling. “I think there is always a part of me that wants to do God’s work for the underserved.  It’s some way that I can contribute.  Every year that I go, there’s a part of me that wants to do more.  I wish we could do more.  We have to do more.”