There can be no value placed on what I learnt on my Development Studies course (well actually £9000 would be a good starting point as it was the cost of the course at the LSE). However, alongside the lectures on governance, institutional development and child rights, there should have been at least one hour dedicated to the real issues of the developing world: it makes relationships very hard work (lesson learnt there is that don't try long-distance), and that dental treatment can be a real issue (the lesson learnt there is below).
My first experience was in Honduras, where my dentist was the runner-up in the Liberal Party's primaries to the now infamous Roberto Micheletti (his goons shot up the door to her surgery and also sent her rather nasty letters to make sure she was runner up to him, but in hindsight that pales as compared to leading the 2009 coup d'etat). Her reaction upon seing the state of my teeth was to laugh out loud, proclaim that my mouth was a mess, and that Britain must be a developing country if its dentists could not sort me out.
My next trip abroad for work was to Tajikistan. My Honduran dentist had insisted that I get my wisdom teeth removed, and so I went through the motions back in the UK to have the procedure done. After 11 months I was scheduled to be operated on, only to be offered a job in Tajikistan with a departure date that fell before the operation. I managed to get a cancellation slot, had all four wisdom teeth out (under general anaesthetic, and was then escorted home on the 381 bus in such a daze that I still have no recollection of the trip). Having reduced the number of teeth in my mouth by 12.5%, I now thought that I would be able to travel and work problem free.
That was until I broke a tooth at a food stop on the mountainous road from Dushanbe to Khujand, when a piece of mutton (that I didn't want to eat in the first place but the driver had decided to "treat" me) proved tougher than my remaining bottom molar. I went to the dentist, who filled the tooth, which promptyly fell out after three months. So I went back again, and asked them to have another go and ended up with the worst dentist I have ever met.
The surgery was the best in town. They even made you put elasticated plastic bags over your shoes in a false declaration of hygeine, and had numerous certificates of qualification from such centres of dentistry excellence as Baku and Gdansk. My dentist, whose name I have forgotten but whose face will haunt me for life, proceeded to inject me with lidocaine to numb the pain of the procedure. Only that he couldn't find the nerve. Nor did he succeed in the following four attempts, so that after an hour of injecting my gum I could still feel the drill on my sore tooth.
Anyway, lidocaine is for losers and so we decided to forge ahead, and it was at that point I realised one of the weaknesses of not having planned the visit in advance, as I did not know the word in Russian (or Tajik) for pain, sensitive, sore, or fuck-me-that-is-my-unaneasthatised-nerve-you-are-drilling-on-you-moron. Seeing my distress, we agreed upon a series of hand signals, ranging from a wiggle of fingers through to a full arm extenion in the style of a Nazi salute which meant that I could not take it any more. But he was not content in only exerting physical pain, and quickly switched to psychological torture too.
As he was trying to fill the hole, George Michael's Jesus to a Child came over the radio. This it turned out was his favourite song, and he just had to, at that very precise moment, have me translate the song for him in to Russian. Little did it matter that I was squirming in his chair with plastic bags on my feet. In the end he filled up the hole, thanked me for a great three hours, and refused to charge me as it was the failure of the original filling that had let to me being there.
Needless to say the filling fell out 2 months later...
So the past nine days in Bangladesh have been a nervous time for me: a root canal and crown procedure, and again as I sat down to have my roots literally drilled and filed out I realised I had not carried over my lessons learnt, and so had no idea as to the Bangla words for pain, sensitive or sore. Thankfully my dentist spoke good English, and would check at regular intervals to ask whether the procedure was "paining" me. It did a little, but compared to the Tajik dentist it was a walk in the park.
My first experience was in Honduras, where my dentist was the runner-up in the Liberal Party's primaries to the now infamous Roberto Micheletti (his goons shot up the door to her surgery and also sent her rather nasty letters to make sure she was runner up to him, but in hindsight that pales as compared to leading the 2009 coup d'etat). Her reaction upon seing the state of my teeth was to laugh out loud, proclaim that my mouth was a mess, and that Britain must be a developing country if its dentists could not sort me out.
My next trip abroad for work was to Tajikistan. My Honduran dentist had insisted that I get my wisdom teeth removed, and so I went through the motions back in the UK to have the procedure done. After 11 months I was scheduled to be operated on, only to be offered a job in Tajikistan with a departure date that fell before the operation. I managed to get a cancellation slot, had all four wisdom teeth out (under general anaesthetic, and was then escorted home on the 381 bus in such a daze that I still have no recollection of the trip). Having reduced the number of teeth in my mouth by 12.5%, I now thought that I would be able to travel and work problem free.
That was until I broke a tooth at a food stop on the mountainous road from Dushanbe to Khujand, when a piece of mutton (that I didn't want to eat in the first place but the driver had decided to "treat" me) proved tougher than my remaining bottom molar. I went to the dentist, who filled the tooth, which promptyly fell out after three months. So I went back again, and asked them to have another go and ended up with the worst dentist I have ever met.
The surgery was the best in town. They even made you put elasticated plastic bags over your shoes in a false declaration of hygeine, and had numerous certificates of qualification from such centres of dentistry excellence as Baku and Gdansk. My dentist, whose name I have forgotten but whose face will haunt me for life, proceeded to inject me with lidocaine to numb the pain of the procedure. Only that he couldn't find the nerve. Nor did he succeed in the following four attempts, so that after an hour of injecting my gum I could still feel the drill on my sore tooth.
Anyway, lidocaine is for losers and so we decided to forge ahead, and it was at that point I realised one of the weaknesses of not having planned the visit in advance, as I did not know the word in Russian (or Tajik) for pain, sensitive, sore, or fuck-me-that-is-my-unaneasthatised-nerve-you-are-drilling-on-you-moron. Seeing my distress, we agreed upon a series of hand signals, ranging from a wiggle of fingers through to a full arm extenion in the style of a Nazi salute which meant that I could not take it any more. But he was not content in only exerting physical pain, and quickly switched to psychological torture too.
As he was trying to fill the hole, George Michael's Jesus to a Child came over the radio. This it turned out was his favourite song, and he just had to, at that very precise moment, have me translate the song for him in to Russian. Little did it matter that I was squirming in his chair with plastic bags on my feet. In the end he filled up the hole, thanked me for a great three hours, and refused to charge me as it was the failure of the original filling that had let to me being there.
Needless to say the filling fell out 2 months later...
So the past nine days in Bangladesh have been a nervous time for me: a root canal and crown procedure, and again as I sat down to have my roots literally drilled and filed out I realised I had not carried over my lessons learnt, and so had no idea as to the Bangla words for pain, sensitive or sore. Thankfully my dentist spoke good English, and would check at regular intervals to ask whether the procedure was "paining" me. It did a little, but compared to the Tajik dentist it was a walk in the park.
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