Next week we will be at the Dentistry Show at the NEC in Birmingham again.

The show has quickly grown to become one of the main events in the dental calendar and I’m delighted that we are going to be there again. If you are coming, and you really should, come see the team on stand J43.

It’s also a great honour for us to be chosen as the beneficiary of the Dentistry Show’s postcard competition this year. You’ve probably taken part in one of these before – you get a postcard when you register with space for stamps which can be picked up at the sponsoring organisations’ stands. Once you have full card, you pop it in a box and get entered into a prize draw.

The prize this year is a funded trip as part of one of our DVP (Dental Volunteer Programme) dental training teams. It’s a fantastic prize for a suitably qualified dentist, hygienist or nurse to have the experience of a lifetime doing something really worthwhile by volunteering in East Africa.

For me it’s a great moment. It signifies the recognition and reputation that DVP has built over the past 7 years as a volunteering opportunity of high quality, and of course its training focus makes it unique – building sustainability with a continuing impact on the community long after the volunteers have left.

It also signifies, by offering a volunteer place as a prize, a recognition that there is an increased desire in the UK dental profession to volunteer overseas, and that can only be a good thing.

The recognition is also reward for the B2A team in the UK and Tanzania for the hard work and commitment they have shown in building DVP from the ground up. In 2004 it was just an idea. It took a lot of effort, skill and sacrifice to make it into what it is today, and I am grateful to the whole team and all our volunteers for making it what it is today.

Whoever the lucky person is that wins at the end of the Dentistry Show, I hope that like the volunteers on the February 2012 programme that finishes today, they will not only have an amazing experience, but they will also leave with an appreciation of the issues people face in the developing world. I hope that like the hundreds of volunteers who have come before them, they see that for volunteering to really make a difference to communities in developing nations, you simply have to train local people – not just try and do as much as you can.

To have a chance of winning the prize, simply register for the Dentistry Show here, and then attend the show on one of the two days – 2nd and 3rd March.

My thanks to the Dentistry Show and the competition sponsors for their support.

I posted a couple of weeks ago from Dodoma – the capital city of Tanzania and the site of our first dental training programme outside Mwanza in the north west where we started work 7 years ago.

The Dodoma Team along with Regional Medical Officer for Dodoma, Exec Director and District Dental Officer

We sent a team of experienced DVP (Dental Volunteer Programme) volunteers to try out the experience of training local health workers in emergency dentistry over 2 weeks in a completely new area. Dodoma may be the capital, but that is a fairly recent appointment, and before then it was simply a truck/bus stop on the route from Dar es Salaam (the commercial capital) to the rest of the country that lies to the north. and west. For that reason, outside of the city centre, it becomes very rural, very quickly.

It was a great success!

Expansion is so important because of the scale of the problem we’re addressing. We’ve done really well in the north where more than 25% of the rural population in the areas where we have trained now live within reach of someone who can relieve their pain.

But that’s still only 5% of the rural population nationally who can get relief, something we plan to change to more than 10% in the coming 3 years.

Testing our systems and model outside of Mwanza so successfully opens the way for us to expand.

I am so glad the volunteers had such a positive experience (they’ve all volunteered to come back when we run the next programme in October!)

Working in a developing country and using your skills is a very rewarding experience. Working in a team to deliver pain relief for hundreds of people in pain gives the volunteer a great sense of satisfaction that they have been able to help.

Sadly, for most volunteering programmes, that is the extent of the impact. This is tragic, because although the effect is great in some ways for the people who receive treatment (because they were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time), it is short lived and doesn’t scratch the surface. I’ll be blogging on this more in the next few weeks.

What makes Bridge2Aid volunteering different is that the trip our volunteers make is just the beginning of their impact.

Because we work in partnership with the government, using our volunteers to train local health workers, we are able to both treat people while our volunteers are with us, but crucially, we can pass on skills to people who will be there next week, and the week after, to treat their own communities.

It’s this kind of partnership to build capacity, rather than simply make a short term, charitable intervention to relieve pain, that we are so committed to.

We chose the volunteer team for the first Dodoma programme because we knew that they wouldn’t be panicked by the usual things that will always go wrong, and be able to evaluate the experience objectively so we could learn from it. I am so pleased that the systems we have designed, the relationships with government that we have nurtured and the hard work of the B2A team and the volunteers has paid off.

Well done everyone involved – we’re moving onward!

If you would like to volunteer with us – click here

This week we took on two new team members in Tanzania to help manage the growth in what we are doing here.

It has left me without an office within the office, so I am moving back to work from home.

The growth we are pushing forward is big – 30% growth in operational impact last year (on a 15% growth in income – we’re efficient) and another 25% projected this year.

If I’m honest I waited too long to appoint new people – my team have been a little fried by the growth – but they are good people and forgive my mistakes (thankfully).

Thanks to growing support across the board we can now make the investment needed to deliver on our promises and implement a high quality programme and help a whole load more people living in pain.

Moving out and working from home brings me full circle. When we first moved here we didn’t actually have an office of any kind. The clinic was the only building we rented and had no office. I worked from a room in our house. It took a couple of years to get to the point of renting an extra room at Hope Dental Centre at which time there were 4 of us working there. A couple of years later and we just had to move and rent a larger building with room to grow into. And now we have, and I’m moving out.

I’m not sad to be moving:

• We now have a mostly Tanzanian team working their behinds off to deliver the programmes – they need to be in there
• I’m not needed day to day any more – I have a fantastic Ops Director and team who make it all happen
• It gives me a bit of space to focus on my key objectives – growing the organisation, getting new support on board, planning the strategy…

Over the next couple of months we’re going to be introducing you to the people who work for Bridge2Aid both here and in the UK. We’re a growing team, but every single one completely committed to helping communities in pain, and every single one essential to that task.

Enjoy your weekend. I’ll be moving…

This week’s post is a V-log recorded in Dodoma, central Tanzania.

I’d love to have written this, but credit goes to Seth Godin, one of my favourite bloggers:

There is never enough time – you just have to decide.

This week we released a video with the aim of helping people to explain what we do, and why we do it.

I am delighted with the results that Jem Patel and JSP Media have come up with.

When we filmed the video in November, I remember having to really focus my thoughts on what we do and the way that we do it.

Now that the production is finished – I’m glad that it comes across loud and clear:

There’s a big problem – people are in pain – if you want to make a difference, you can – but for goodness sake TRAIN people, empower people, build capacity. Otherwise your efforts will be shortlived and have a limited effect. Ultimately, sadly, they may well be a waste of your time, and inadvertently, you will dis-empower the very people you are trying to help.

The video is in the About Us – Movie link above.

It’s 15 minutes long (so grab a coffee before you watch it). Enjoy.

If you followed our ’12 days of Christmas’ on Facebook, you’ll know that last year was an incredible one for Bridge2Aid.

Together with our donors and volunteers, a huge amount was achieved right across the organisation.

We trained 47 Clinical Officers in emergency dentistry, completed refurbishment works at Bukumbi, and ran a very successful dental clinic. We also delivered a very high standard of administration in the UK, with record high satisfaction scores from our volunteers, and a huge amount raised and donated by our supporters.

On the surface – it looks great. And it is.

But it came at a cost – we had to work REALLY hard to make it happen!

Like a duck moving across a pond, it’s all smooth on the surface, but in order to make progress, the duck is paddling furiously under the surface.

One of the things I am most proud of in our team is the work ethic they embody. There is a lot of paddling going on every day!

They also work with a great deal of creativity – if there’s a way to make something work, we’ll find it! This is so important, particularly in Tanzania where things frequently go wrong or get delayed – like the 2 DVP sites that we lost 1 week and 3 weeks before the programme was due to start, the constant delays to flights, transportation or severe weather, last minute changes in government personnel, or an official who decides that today is the day he is going to be less than co-operative…

So as you read the 12 days, and it all looks to have gone really well (and it has!), please remember that every achievement has been more than paid for with sweat and (in some cases) tears, (but thankfully no blood), by the B2A team, our volunteers, and fantastic fundraisers.

If you were part of the story this year – thank you, and well done. If you would like to be part of the 2012 story – please have a look around the site, and if you see something you would like to help with, get in touch. We have lots of ways for you to become part of making a big difference in the lives of many, many people in the year ahead.