Meet Amir Cain
Amir Cain manages NATAN’s Dental Clinic in Tel Aviv. Since retiring from his 36-year career in high tech, Amir has devoted his time to volunteering in areas ranging from mentoring college graduates seeking jobs matching their potential to helping rebuild kibbutz homes destroyed during the October 7, 2023 attack. Amir joined NATAN Worldwide Disaster Relief last year, taking on the challenge of establishing and running our new dental clinic for underserved populations in Tel Aviv. Challenge met! The clinic began operations on target and now serves the community weekly.
We asked Amir to tell us about the project…
What brought you to NATAN?
Well, it’s not really what, but who? Yael Fradkin, NATAN’s long-time project manager, brought me into the NATAN family. Yael and I grew up together and we have been good friends ever since our elementary school days. Knowing my experience in operations and project management, Yael asked me to step in and run this project. It was a perfect fit. I love the clinic and the satisfaction of the meaningful work we are doing there. I thought this would be something temporary, just to get the clinic up and running. But managing its operations is so rewarding, that I stayed on.
Tell us about the clinic
NATAN Worldwide Disaster Relief has been operating mobile dental clinics since 2018, both in Israel and at refugee camps abroad. For the past years, NATAN has operated a weekly dental clinic in Haifa which serves people who have no other access to dental treatment. We established the Tel Aviv clinic to expand our work to help even more people in dire need. We were fortunate to have a clinic space allocated by the Tel Aviv municipality in the well-baby clinic (“Tipat Halav”) in south Tel Aviv. This is where the neediest community lives. A roster of volunteer dentists and partnerships with an x-ray lab and a denture manufacturing lab enable us to expand our services and provide quality dental care free to all our patients.
Our target population are the people who do not have access to dental care. These are the homeless, the undocumented, the people living at the edge of the city: literally and figuratively. Some asylum-seekers, some simply undocumented or homeless shelters. These people are living day-to-day and dental care is low on their priority list. First they must survive, find work, feed themselves and their families. And even when they know they need dental care, it’s not easy for them to find it or fund it. There are culture and language barriers. Due to the fact that dental care is low on their priority list, often when they come to the clinic their dental status and oral hygiene is in bad shape and we do the best to keep and save any tooth if possible. Many of our patients are from Eritrea, Sudan and other countries. One our first steps was to bring in a language mediator. Happily, we found the perfect person. She’s from the community and has already worked with other nonprofits, so she’s got the experience we need. She helps us contact the patients, set up appointments and mediate and translate issues that arise. For the patients, getting to appointments is not always easy. They often do day labor and can’t get away at a pre-set time. These are just some of the challenges we face.
How did you get the clinic going?
Our first task was to get the clinic set up: organizing the space, bringing in the equipment and supplies donated to us by organizations and generous individuals. Most of the equipment and tools were in use during the October 7th war where Natan was the first and only to established dental care in Eilat and the Dead-Sea. So some tools were stored since and had to be sorted cleaned and sterilized. NATAN, an Israel-based NGO, is lucky to have a roster of professional volunteer dentists who are eager to give back to the community. So we are able to staff the clinic with professionals. But filling shifts with volunteer dentists is not as simple as it may sound. There is a challenge in meeting all of the dental care needs of a diverse population, since every dentist has a different specialty. Some dentist can do root canal treatment, some are pediatric dentists, others specialize in dentures, etc. And each dentist is available to volunteer at specific, limited times and days. We need to fit all of that into our operating schedule. Luckily this where Yael comes to save us and solve the multi-dimensional puzzle. These and other challenges are just made for an experienced operations manager like me.
I used the method that got me through many a project in my days in the tech industry: ‘Crawl, Walk, Run’. We start slowly and learn as we go. There are obstacles we didn’t expect and hurdles to jump over. We try and try again and we build on every lesson learned. The same methods that worked for me in the private sector are working now in my role at NATAN Worldwide Disaster Relief.
As an enthusiastic volunteer, what keeps you going?
I’m delighted to see the joy and relief on the faces of our patients. Some of the people had lost hope of ever being able to smile again. And we bring the smiles back: restoring not just their dental health but also their dignity and self-respect. That’s why our motto is “Bringing back smiles, bringing back dignity”.
Our goal is to restore teeth through treatment, but that’s not always possible. Sometimes the patient’s teeth cannot be saved. In those case where full extraction is the only option, we are fortunate to be able to offer dentures, which we receive free or at a discounted price from a dental lab. We are able to offer this very needy community dental care that’s free and non-judgmental. Our reward is in seeing these people smile again. They arrived at our door in need, often after sleepless nights in pain. They leave with their smiles and dignity restored. That’s our goal and that’s what keeps us the volunteers, and our volunteer dentists coming back to volunteer again and again.
To learn more about dental care at NATAN non-profit, please see https://natanrelief.org/operations/
To join our network of volunteers: https://natanrelief.org/volunteer/