Cardiff Dentist Arrives in Calais to Aid Refugees
A dentist from Cardiff has arrived in Calais to provide dental care for refugees. Raid Ali felt compelled to make the journey after seeing stories in the newspapers and on TV broadcasts.
Mr Ali has been collecting donations for supplies and equipment for the last few weeks and he has now made the journey to Calais where he has set up a makeshift dental clinic in ‘the jungle’.
Although Mr Ali was prepared for his working environment to be different from his usual treatment room, he was shocked at the conditions people were living in and the lack of help available to them.
Mr Ali said that many of the people he has seen so far have been living in squalor for the last few months and the last thing they think about is their teeth. They have struggled with dental pain and many also have facial injuries caused by trying to climb aboard lorries and trains in motion.
Mr Ali has now been devoting his weekends to helping in Calais for a few weeks, finishing early on a Friday and heading across the Channel to help out however he can. He said that dental pain is very common and there have also been many cases of abscesses, broken teeth and head injuries.
He said the situation is nothing you can prepare yourself for. There are very few toilets, you have to queue for hours for a shower and even the most basic health and dental care is absent.
Initially, the Cardiff dentist visited people’s tents and asked them if there was any way he could help them out, but now he is working from a caravan, which he has turned into a temporary clinic. The caravan was funded by an appeal on Facebook, which attracted a huge amount of support in a very short space of time.
When he first visited, Mr Ali was the only volunteer dentist around, but now there are more doctors and dentists from the UK offering their services and social media has generated interest in his story and helped to raise awareness of the refugee crisis and the plight of hundreds of people living in Calais.
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