Greenwich Magazine
Helping those who have literally nothing in the way of medical/ dental care, these local doctors are saving the world one patient at a time.
Single-engine planes, rickety trains, helicopters and horseback. These are but a few of the modes of transport for the globetrotting Greenwich doctors who make arduous annual treks to remote villages, where the people are poor and the resources scant. Hauling donated equipment and medicine by motor scooter and city bus, they arrive at the far reaches of the world, offering care, dignity and hope to complete strangers who suffer maladies from malnutrition and painfully infected teeth to hernias and heart defects.
Stopping the Tears: Dr. Al Repicci
One would be hard-pressed to meet a local doctor who has embraced overseas missions with more zeal than Dr. Albert Repicci, a Greenwich-based orthodontist in private practice who lives with his wife, Janice, in Riverside. Though Dr. Repicci enjoys writing, sailing, golfing and spending time at Greenwich Point and Island Beach, his true passion lies in helping the helpless in undeveloped countries. What started out as a one-time dental mission has turned into a twenty-eight-year commitment to helping needy foreigners procure everything from immunizations to housing and education.
On his first solo mission trip in 1981, to the newly independent Island of Antigua, Repicci got off the boat and found there was no clinic and no one with information concerning his upcoming volunteer stint. About to head home, his cab driver suggested he seek out a pastor who had an old dental chair in the back of his church. He recalls, “I implored a street vendor to assist me in the call to this pastor’s church. Sure enough, Pastor Mills answered and, after I shared my disillusionment with him, he persuaded me to come back and work from his church, which I did, for ten more years.”
After serving on annual two-week missions in Antigua, for the next decade, he began volunteering with Medical Ministries International (MMI), an organization that takes medical surplus that would end up in American landfills to Third-World countries. For the next fifteen years, he served with MMI on as many as three two-week projects a year in the poorest corners of the world.
From the start, he recognized that his U.S. dental training (filling cavities, in-stalling crowns, etc.) had little application in third-world countries, where surgical removal of painful, diseased teeth and oral tissue was the most reasonable service he could offer. He says, “That philosophy was reinforced when the mission projects expanded over those next twenty-seven years to jungles, mountainsides or remote villages that offered no access to water, electricity or even a chair.”
Though treating 200 or so patients in a given country may not have made much of a dent in their overall quality of life, he says, “These dental projects facilitated my access to remote people, providing me with the opportunity to see, firsthand, the bigger picture of a definable population’s needs.”
That’s when Dr. Repicci began turning obstacles into opportunities. For instance, after enrolling his children in the local Catholic school during a two-week mission in Antigua, he noted a dire need for fluoride. “Through the intercession of the bishop and concurrence of the Minister of Health,” he says, “we had enough sodium fluoride delivered to offer monthly doses for five years to every child in Antigua aged six to twelve.”
Back in Greenwich, he started putting together a team to address many of the larger issues he encountered, such as widespread disease. “In most of the countries we visited, among the diseases that prevailed, such as malaria, TB and malnutrition, the incidence of AIDS was about thirty-five percent, so it was not only a considerable risk to those of us doing surgery, but it was a devastating circumstance for the inhabitants to endure. Education, therefore, became an important service that was complicated by the contradictory information natives received from the threatening witch doctors.”
So Dr. Repicci switched gears from providing dental care to providing education and assistance in whatever form fit the bill. In Swaziland, for instance, his team saw the need for a vehicle to transport the native practitioners to remote villages, so they provided a jeep. In the Philippines, they introduced chicken, duck and goat farms to sustain the population. In Kenya, they implemented an immunization project to serve several thousand people per year. In Mongolia, they provided nomadic homes, or yurts. Along the tributaries of the Amazon in Peru, they installed water wells and, while in Cambodia, they established a center for women and children at risk of exploitation that offers meals, literacy, health service, hygiene and alternative-career guidance.
Moved by the horrors he witnessed in Cambodia, Dr. Repicci inaugurated the Stop the Tears Foundation in 2002, an organization dedicated to helping exploited women and children in Third-World countries. Of the Cambodian plight, Dr. Repicci says, “The women are young peasants who had come to Phnom Penh to work in the factories for a little over $1 a day. They live in slum conditions and are easy prey for trafficking. Southeast Asia, and especially Cambodia, has the largest incidence of sex trafficking in the world. With the economic downturn, their meager jobs are now at even greater risk. The abandoned children of the factory workers who would otherwise just roam the street at risk of being exploited are being fed, schooled and instilled with the cultural history of their country.”
Every year, Dr. Repicci and his colleagues in MMI pack up supplies and make a grueling trek. To get to Cambodia/Vietnam, for example, they fly from New York to Tokyo then on to Bangkok, stay overnight, and then move on to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The next day, they take a river barge up the Mekong River, disembarking on a muddy landing where they are greeted by a horse-drawn cart and motor scooters that climb the muddy trail to the village where they will be working. To reach many other remote populations, the team has been dropped off by helicopter in the Himalayas, by single-engine aircraft on the plains of Mozambique and by boat on the Amazon.
The missionaries think nothing of the rigorous journey when compared to the rewards. Dr. Repicci says, “My enthusiasm is fueled by each preceding project, while the colleagues I work with are my inspiration. I also realize that in every project I represent my country, the United States, as well as my profession, dentistry. These, too, are motivating factors. I have come to realize that international diplomacy is not just for career diplomats, it occurs at the person-to-person level.”