On the Job

As I said, I work at Maniilaq Association.  The association is actually run by a board of directors that represents Kotzebue and the surrounding villages with cool names like Kiana, Noorvik, Noatak, Selawak, Kivalina, and Salugnak.  Each village has a small clinic of its own, but for most things they have to fly to Kotzebue.  Maniilaq encompasses medical, dental, mental, and elder care plus other educational resources for people around here.  If there is stuff too big for us here in Kotzebue, people have to fly all the way to Anchorage, which is like a $500 round trip flight.  In dental, that includes things like ortho and endo.  So, as you can imagine, a lot of times people just can’t afford to travel to get some procedures done.  Medicaid does pay for some trips though depending on what they need to have done and what alternatives we can offer in Kotzebue. 

The hospital and dental clinic here are super nice!  Everything, from the equipment to the facilities, is really great.  

I am working as a dental assistant.  The other assistants are very nice and friendly.

They are all from Kotzebue or one of the villages, and they think I’m weird when I ask a million questions about stuff that they’ve done since they were born.

The doctors and ladies that run the office are great, too.

I think working as an assistant is teaching me a lot about the behind the scenes of how a dental office works.  There are things they don’t teach us how to do in dental school, because we’ll never have to do them.  But we do need to be able to train people to do those jobs, know how we want or need them done, and be able to know if they are being done properly.

It does make me glad that, one day, I will be the dentist and not the assistant forever though.