Ventura County Reporter - Cover Story
March 30, 2006

 

Self-guided Mission

Santa Barbara dentist James Rolfe hopes his Afghanistan
Relief Project will help heal a devastated country that
has been abandoned by the United States

Ultimate Commitment

Dentist James Rolfe is intent on saving lives in
Afghanistan one tooth at a time
by Stephanie Kinnear

James Rolfe's dental office is situated on a sunny patch of Canon
Perdido Street, tucked in cozily next to the Lobero theatre, in downtown
Santa Barbara. On a Wednesday afternoon, State Street shoppers walk lazily
by - sipping blended mochas, toting minature dogs, enjoying a bit of
fleeting sunshine after days of intermittent rain. But Rolfe isn't in
the office. One very long mile away, on East Yanonali Street, with the
steady whir of traffic on the 101 playing like a soundtrack, the dentist
is working on something a world away from his Santa Barbara practice.

Down a dirt road in the more industrial part of Yanonali, James Rolfe is
packing. His long gray ponytail pokes out from under a navy blue base-
ball cap that reads "University of the Pacific School of Dentistry," Rolfe's
alma mater. Although he is not above average height, he does have the hands
of a much larger man. Rough, strong hands - dirty fingernails, cracked skin.
In this environment he looksless like a dentist and more like an eccentric
philosophy professor with a knack for carpentry. His gray T-shirt has a
stain near the right shoulder and his shoes look worn at the toes. Rolfe is
handsome; his eyes, from behind a pair of reading glasses, are warm.

He is moving things into and out of a beige, 40 foot shipping crate about the
size of an extreemly large motor home that, from the outside, looks likes
nothing more than a metal rectangular box. But inside, Rolfe has transformed
the box into a shippable dental clinic with three dentist chairs, all the
requisite dental assistant instruments, a sanatizing room, X-ray equipment
and a fully functioning modern dental lab. Although it is a bit
claustrophobic, dentistry doesn't really call for much personal space, so
the crate seems sufficient. Along the inside walls, Rolfe's girlfriend,
Yoshiko Nester, has painted words like "love" and "dreams" in English and
Farsi. And that's because this crate isn't long for Santa Barbara; in a
matter of weeks it will find itself en route to Afghanistan.

THE PROJECT

Rolfe visited Afghanistan for the first time in the spring of 2003.

After closely following the various conflicts and the devastation of the
Afghan people for decades, he was moved to do something for the country
himself. He founded the Afghanistan Dental Relief Project, packed 500
pounds of dental equipment, bought a plane ticket and headed to an orphange
in the province of Wardak. For three weeks he worked from 6:30 AM until 10
at night, providing dental services to the children of the orphanage as
well as the larger community. While he worked, slowly, the children started
shadowing him. And a natural training program evolved as Rolfe began
teaching them to be his assistants.

There were no dentists in the province. "The things I saw," says Rolfe.
"Multiple abscessed teeth. No pain medication. No antibiotics. It made me cry."

AFter returning home from Wardak, it wasn't long before he bought another
plane ticket, this time to the capital city of Kabul, where he spent two
weeks providing dental services at a women's clinic. Women, Rolfe found were
particularly underserved because of their relegated position in the culture.
According the Amnesty International's 2005 report on Afghanistan, women there
continue to "face systematic and widespread violence, and public and private
discrimination," and are still commonly imprisoned "for running away from home,
adultery and other sexual activity outside marriage- known as zina crimes."

When he returned home for the second time, Rolfe decided to make a more long-
term commitment to the Afghan people.

"People in Afghanistan are so neglected and are not being helped by America,"
he explains. "And, so often we don't feel empowered to run our own lives.
There's no politician to vote for and everything is imposed. I wanted to do
this to feel empowered. I would decide to make it happen."

And so he did.

Instead of making periodic trips and helping the people in Afghanistan for short
periods of time every few years, Rolfe decided he wanted to do something more
permanent. He wanted to ensure that the people he was helping would have continued
services. And the only way he could imagine to do that would be to build a dental
clinic in Kabul. Or, rather, build a dental clinic in America and ship it Kabul
and open it to the public, all the while training orphans and widows to do the
dental work so that the clinic sustains itself into the future.

It was a wonderful idea, but an unbelievably complicated one. In order to build
something like this, one would need to have the skills of an electrician, a
mechanical engineer, an architecht, a graphic designer, a carpenter, a painter,
and a few other varied professionals. In order to secure the land and get approval
from the Afghanistan government, one would need to be a skilled diplomat, a savvy
businessman and a seasoned negotiator, and it wouldn't hurt to speak Farsi.
But, Rolfe had only himself and the occasional friend volunteering a few hours
here and there.

So, what did he do? He made a lot of mistakes, be he started and he didn't stop.

THE PATH

If he is forced to break it down, Rolfe figures that he works 40 hours a week at
his regular practice on Canon Perdido, 30 hours a week doing his own lab work (a
rarity among dentists, most of whom outsource lab work), and 50 hours a week on
his Afghanistan project. If he was fortunate enough to get 7 hours of sleep a
night, that would leave him exacltly 0 hours of free time during the week. But,
of course, we haven't factored in the emails he has to answer and the more
office related, logistical aspects of pulling off something like this.

Rolfe admits that the schedule, whic he's kept for the past 14 months, is
driving his girlfriend nuts. He says it casually enough, though, shaking his
head in amusement at the person he's become. "Everything else has faded out.
I crave dong things that aren't structured, that are just fun. So I have to watch
myself. I've really become like a machine," he says only half-jokingly.

And then there's the financial burden. Rolfe estimates that, thus far, he has
spent $140,000 dollars of his own money on the project. While it's safe to
assume that most dentists that practice in Santa Barbara live comfortable on
the hillside with views of the ocean, Rolfe lives in a low income condo that
costs him $500 dollars a month and manages to survive on roughly $7000 dollars
a year. "I live like a street person," he says, explaining that 95 percent of
what he uses on a day to day basis is recycled.

"We're basically hunter-gatherers ... our essence is hunter gatherers," he says.
"By doing this, I satify myself. I kind of save the world at the same time. I
negate my impact on the environment. Recycling is more than cashing in bottles."

This philosophy came in handy when it was time to furnish the dental clinic with
equipment. Much of what Rolfe has installed was donated from other U.S. dentists
who found out about the project by word of mouth. Although the majority of
donations were broken in one way or another when he got his hands on them, he's
since repaired everything and all of it is now in working order. The generator
he has stored in another shipping crate was donated by a marijuana grower in
Humboldt. Rolfe drove all the way to Humboldt one day to pick it up, and all the
way back the next. The 200 blankets he plans on taking with him to Afghanistan
are actually moving pads he salvaged out of a dumpster behind a brand new 24 hour
Fitness near his office. Standing at the edge of another shipping container
that is jammed full of supplies (there are seven crates total), he rests his hand
on a propane tank. Someone had thrown it out, he explains, just because it had
a busted valve. Now, of course, it's as good as new.

As Rolfe rearranges a few items in the crate, Scott Savre drops by to show him a
color diagram of the project he recently created on his computer. Once
everything is delivered in Kabu, Rolfe intends to form a quad area with four of
the crates - a sort of dental clinic compound.

Savre is one of Dr. Rolfe's patients and has volunteered close to 800 hours of
his own time over the course of the last year. "I twisted his arm", jokes Rolfe.

When violent rains pummeled Ventura and Santa Barbara in the winter of 2005,
Savre was there installing cabinetry with Dr. Rolfe. Around the same time mud
rushed down the hillside and covered a tiny enclave of La Conchita, the two
were working furiously despite the torrential rain and simultaneously struggling
to keep things in the clinic dry.

Savre moves a stray strand of hair out of his face as he opens up a photo album
that seems to have materialized out of thin air. In the album, are pictures of
the project from the inception. On one page, the inside of an empty crate that
looks nothing like the dental clinic that now sits only a few feet from where
the two are standing. On another page, there is Rolfe, hammer in hand, with
nothing but a few lamps illuminating the pitch darkness.

THE PEOPLE

Recently, although one could never consider him much of a self-promoter, Rolfe
has found himself in the midst of a small storm of media attention. Over the
course of a few days in early March, his face graced the cover of a handful
of Santa Barbara newspapers.

But Rolfe insists that none of this is really about him; rather, it's
about the people of Afghanistan.

"My purpose is to help people. I really feel the need of the people," he says
before running off a litany of staggering statistics that he has gathered
about Afghanistan. The average life expectancy is only 42 years. There is
only a 30% literacy rate there. Unemployment is endemic - one person per
family might have a job. There has been an 8-year drought. Water quality is
abysmal. There are 27 million people in Afghanistan and 10 percent of them
are orphans. There is no running water or electricity in Kabul. Half of the
buildings there are in ruins. There are 134 dentists in the whole country.
People are dying from abscessed teeth because they don't have access to
antibiotics.

"The people have been forgotten and abandoned," says Rolfe. "This is a
lifesaving mission. We think of cosmetic dentistry, but people there are
dying..."

In Rolfe's opinion, Afghanistan was used as a pawn during the Soviet-Afghan
War of the 1980's, when the U.S. supplied support in the form of arms to
Afghan rebels as they fought the Soviets. "I've followed our government's
involvement in Afghanistan," he explains. "We were so aggressive. Decimated
the people and then left ... The Afghan people were cannon fodder for the
U.S. when they faced Russia. And after the war, we didn't help."

More than once, while Rolfe explains the conditions he's witnessed
during his visits to Afghanistan, his eyes glisten. "This affects
me on a very emotional level. Probably more than it should," he says
blinking back tears.

Rolfe's philisophy is a simple one: As one of the richest countries, the
U.S. should be helping one of the poorest countries, which is Afghanistan.
Instead of taking on that benevolent role of a big brother, though, he
is dismayed that the U.S. has become an international bully.

THE PLAN

Everything is packed and Rolfe now awaits a number of contracts that need
to be signed by the Afghanistan government. Once those are signed and
back into his hands, the shipping will begin. A giant crane has already
weighed one of the containers to see if it can be easily transported.
At 36,000 pounds it will be able to travel on a standard truck before
it is shipped to Port Rotterdam in Holland, sent on a train across
eastern Europe to Southern Russia, and then trucked through
Uzbekistan to Afghanistan.

Shipping all of the equipment will most likely add up to another $20,000
dollars, according to Rolfe's rough estimates. Luckily, a large donation
from the Raquim foundation, a humanitarian organization that does public
service work in Afghanistan, means that he wont have to foot the bill by
himself.

After the equipment is shipped, Rolfe plans on making three different
trips - one to survey the land and mark the exact places where the four
crates that will make up the quadrangle need to be placed, then to setup
the facility and, finally, when it opens, to begin provinding services
and dental training to the community.

One of the most important aspects of the whole project is the educational
component. Along with the toothbrushes, Rolfe is also shipping blackboards
and desks as well as mattresses. Next to the clinic there will be
training facility where orphans and widows will be trained as dental
assistants, hygienists and lab workers. And the mattresses will be for
the roster of International dentists that Rolfe hopes will decide to
volunteer their time and skills.

Then, eventually, Rolfe plans to transform the compound into a permanent
facility and ship the movable clinic to another area that needs help.

"This will catch on," says Rolfe, optimistically. "And I'll get some
kind of funding and I won't have to do it all by myself."

HOW TO HELP

Although the project is in its final stages, there is still so much to be
done and James Rolfe is looking for volunteers for a variety of
different tasks.

Those interested in helping can find out more at

WWW.ADRPINC.ORG

Please send your tax deductible donations to the ADRP headquarters at

311 East Canon Perdido Street Santa Barbara, CA 93101

James Rolfe can be reached at

ADRP@VERIZON.NET

Click on here to view the scanned article pg. 1

Click on here to view the scanned article pg. 2

Please access our website, www.adrpinc.org.

Thank you for your interest.
James G. Rolfe, DDS; Founder
Afghanistan Dental Relief Project, Inc.