Dr. Jeannette Grauer examines her young patients during one of her annual trips to the Amazon Basin to provide dental care for children and training for health care workers.
Photos courtesy www.amazondental.com
June 26, 2008
On a 10-day trip, there are only so many people in the vast Amazon Basin one person can help. But that doesn’t deter Jeannette Grauer, the Union-based dentist who, since 2001, has been traveling every year to Peru to help people in remote villages there.
To illustrate the power of a single act, she quoted the story of a child who found thousands of tiny sea horses stranded on a beach: “Her father said, ‘There are so many; you can’t really make a difference,’ but she told him, ‘Yes, but to each one that I throw back into the water, it does make a difference.’”
For each of the Peruvian children Grauer treats, it makes a difference too. Grauer was in Peru most recently, from May 28 to June 13, during which she and her seven volunteer assistants treated as many as 1,200 patients. As on previous trips, she also trained native auxiliaries and local medicine people to provide preventive care and basic dental work.
Grauer talked about the trip last week in her Union office, an airy, elegant room, whose only visible link to the jungle side of the dentist’s life are two books about the Amazon and a photo of her surrounded by village children.
She loves the tropical South American region for its abundance and diversity. “It’s the womb of the earth,” she said. “Just relating to nature there feels so right, with its warmth and wholesomeness.” She talks of the people she has met there — with their gentle, harmonious ways — with passion and respect.
Born and brought up in Montevideo, Uruguay, Grauer said she grew up in a Jewish family that set an example of community service. Her mother’s father — originally from Poland — was one of the first Jews to settle there.
Grauer, rear, in cap, with a few of the hundreds of Peruvian children she treated on a recent trip to the Amazon.
Her family pushed her to seek a career that would give her international mobility — just in case things turned bad for the Jews. She chose dentistry, she said, drawn both by its intimate involvement with people and the artistry of shaping beautiful smiles.
Though no crisis arose, she, her then husband, and their two sons came to the United States in 1984. She took a further degree at the School of Dental and Oral Surgery at Columbia University in New York and opened her practice in Elizabeth in 1991, specializing in cosmetic and reconstructive dentistry. She moved to her state-of-the-art premises in Union six years ago.
Grauer lives in Bedminster. Her sons, now 28 and 26, attended Solomon Schechter Day School of Essex and Union, first in Cranford and then West Orange. She is a member of Hadassah and through that connection joined the Rachel Coalition — which seeks to raise awareness and promote prevention of domestic violence — serving for many years as its advocacy chair.
In 2001, she took part in a mission to bring dental care to remote areas in Peru. Returning for the fourth time in 2004, she jumped at a chance to travel into the Amazon region, and she was hooked. She established the Amazon Dental Project, as a part of the Amazon Medical Project, funding her annual trips with her own money and contributions from family, friends, and fellow health professionals.
Eliav Levy of Springfield, 18, prepares dental instruments as patients wait to see the dentist at a makeshift clinic in the Amazon.
Evident benefits
A red-haired woman with fair skin that attracts mosquitoes, she might have been expected to recoil from sojourns in the tropics. But neither insects, the difficulty of the voyage — by air to Lima and then Iquitos, and then by boat and on foot to areas otherwise unreachable — nor the Spartan accommodations — she and her crew sleep on the floor on thin foam mats, making do without electricity and eating local foods — daunted Grauer. After the first visit, she said, she was eager for more — and so, she said, were her team members.
This year, she said, “five of the seven people who came with me were returnees. They all love it.”
A highlight of this year’s trip was the opportunity to use the solar-powered drill they brought with them. With delight, she showed the two compact cases it comes in, complete with an air pump. “It works just as well as an electric one,” she said. On the low-tech side, she got to try out a leaf local people chew to clean their teeth.
The volunteers, who cover their own expenses, are carefully selected. Grauer said only completely healthy people are accepted — for their own sake, but also to ensure that they don’t bring with them infections to which the local people might be vulnerable.
She also requires that they be open and respectful to the people they will treat. Grauer said, “We are not there to ‘give’ to them. We are there to offer support, to show that we care for them and value who they are and who they have been for the forest and the area.”
Grauer and two of her volunteer assistants pose with people from the Yagua community — some of their patients in the Amazon.
As fleeting as her visits are, in the few years she has been returning each year to the same communities, the benefit has been evident: “Each year, I’m seeing fewer and fewer emergencies,” she said.
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