Following his conscience to Kabul

   One area dentist moved by the war-torn Middle East does what he can to help

   By Kim Lamb Gregory, kgregory@VenturaCountyStar.com
   January 8, 2006

The mouths Jim Rolfe sees during an average day in his Santa Barbara dental office might include a chipped tooth, a cavity or perhaps enamel that could be a few shades pearlier.

The mouths Rolfe will see during an average day in the dental office he plans to open in Kabul, Afghanistan, will likely include rows of missing teeth, abscessed roots and swollen, cherry-red gums.

"They haven't heard of toothbrushes; they don't have any antibiotics," Rolfe said. "People can die from abscessed teeth."

If he can raise enough money for shipping costs, Rolfe plans to ship a homemade mobile dental clinic to Kabul at the end of January. He built the clinic -- which includes a lab and a classroom -- out of two used shipping crates.

It's a project that has consumed him ever since he visited Afghanistan in 2002 to volunteer his dental expertise at an orphanage. "It affected me so much emotionally that I became obsessed with doing this," said Rolfe, 66. He saw numerous health needs among rank and file Afghans; dentistry was an obvious area in which he could help.

In 2003, he founded a nonprofit organization called the Afghanistan Dental Relief Project. The project -- which is coordinated in part through Afghanistan's ministry of health and education -- is aimed at creating a permanent dental office in Kabul where he and other dentists can regularly donate their skills.

"This is a man who is passionate about making a difference in the world," said Camarillo pediatric dentist Mark Lisagor. "He's almost a Lawrence of Arabia type character."

Lisagor is among the dentists who hope to volunteer their services at Rolfe's clinic.

Having volunteered his dental skills in spots like Vietnam, Nepal, Guatemala and Israel, Lisagor contacted Rolfe after reading about him in a dental journal.

The Camarillo dentist said he believes Afghanistan is an ideal place to try to make a difference.

"Here is this really hard-core Islamic place where from birth they are taught we Americans are pretty much to be hated," he said. "Jim's thinking the only way we'll overcome that is to let them see a different face of what America is all about, one person at a time."

Lisagor donated several volunteer hours, a vacuum pump and a sign written in Farsi that will hang over the office.

Not an easy sell

The permanent dental office is sitting right now in a shipping yard in Santa Barbara, almost complete after a year of work -- about 4,000 hours.

Rolfe has help and support from several volunteers and businesses in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties -- including American Tooth Industries in Oxnard, which donated 37,000 sets of dentures -- but Rolfe has done almost all of the construction work.

Asking for help for a project in that part of the world, Rolfe said, is not an easy sell. "There's been so much reaction to Iraq, nobody wants to think about the Middle East," he said. Religious organizations have offered to help him, but only on the condition they can spread their religion to the Afghans. He wants no religious proselytizing associated with this project, so he turned them down.

Rolfe usually works alone as he continues to toil away on the shipping crate clinic with every hour he isn't spending in his dental office. He has done everything from wiring to installing drywall to repairing secondhand dental equipment. "I'm just a handy guy," he said.

Over the years, Rolfe has helped finance the effort with $170,000 out of his own pocket.

Not too crippling a sacrifice if you're picturing a Santa Barbara dentist with a BMW, timeshares and perhaps a splashing fountain in the courtyard of a million-dollar, hacienda-style home.

Not even close. Rolfe, who is divorced, is living $7,000 below the poverty level so that he can divert money to the project. He lives in a $600-a-month condo and rides a motorcycle. He hauls donations and supplies for his project with a 1962 GMC truck with 200,000 miles on it.

"I drive all over California picking this up," he said, gesturing to piles of secondhand dental equipment he is repairing and installing into the shipping-crate dental clinic.

Now and then, the dentist snacks on a bowl of candy sitting on a worktable inside the crate. "I keep working and sometimes I don't stop to eat, so I have to keep my blood sugar up," he explained. (Regular cleaning can prevent tooth decay, even if you eat sweets, he said.)

He works about 115 hours a week on his project and his dental practice.

After putting in a long day in the dental office, Rolfe gets tired, but keeps driving himself -- sometimes too far. "I've broken bones. I've sewed myself up three times," he said.

He shoots himself with Novocain, sews himself up and keeps working because he wants to maximize his income from his dental practice right now.

After living expenses, the money he makes in his dental practice goes toward his project. He says he has no money saved for retirement.

"I think I'm living on karma instead of money," he said. "The money is not very valuable. I think it's more important that I live within my conscience."

One take on terrorism

Rolfe's conscience tells him that America, as a superpower, owed it to Afghanistan to help rebuild after the Soviet-Afghanistan war, which lasted from 1979 to 1988. "All we did was use them to defeat the Soviets," said Rolfe, whose political views are decidedly to the left. "They got crushed in between. Half the buildings in Kabul were destroyed."

With no electricity or water for a city of 4 million people and a decimated infrastructure, Afghanistan was, in Rolfe's view, an ideal breeding ground for terrorists like Osama bin Laden.

"Had the U.S. helped to establish an economy by providing financial aid for public service projects and arbitrating differences between factions, bin Laden would never have been invited or allowed to become established in Afghanistan," Rolfe said.

A country that is not desperately trying to meet its basic survival needs is less likely to allow terrorism, Rolfe believes. In his opinion, military force is not the answer.

"I'm not in favor of our government's policy in the Middle East," he said. "I feel like we should be the big brother rather than the big bully."

California State University, Northridge, political science professor Mehran Kamrava, Ph.D., agrees this is a problem that cannot be solved with force alone. "To combat terrorism through arms is to miss the bigger picture of creating opportunity for people through healthcare and a future for the people," he said.

Kamrava, an Iranian native who specializes in Middle Eastern politics and economics, believes the dentist has indeed exposed the root causes of terrorism: "crushing poverty, a pervasive sense of despair and hopelessness."

"Reinforcing this is an absence of a democratic means of political expression," he said. "Instead, they resort to acts of extremism." These acts often are virulently anti-American, he said.

"There is the perception in the Middle East that Americans are uncaring and unsympathetic to those in need," Kamrava said. "What this dentist is doing in his small way -- he's trying to right these misperceptions."

A dangerous mission?

Rolfe still needs $20,000 to send the mobile clinic to Afghanistan in a few weeks. The clinic will travel by freighter to Rotterdam in the Netherlands. From there, it will go by rail to southern Russia and then by truck through Uzbekistan and finally to Kabul. Besides dental supplies, the container will be stuffed with items such as toys and shoes for Afghan orphans.

Afghanistan's roughly 3 million orphans are what drew Rolfe there in 2002. He read a story about them in a Santa Barbara newspaper and decided to volunteer to help.

Since he founded the Afghanistan Dental Relief Project, he has returned there twice; he plans to go to Kabul in February to secure the plot of land for the clinic. In April, he will go again to attach the roof and hook up water and electricity.

Eventually, Rolfe plans to add classrooms where Afghans can be trained to be technicians or dental hygienists. "There are more than 3 million orphans becoming adults with no jobs and no opportunity," he noted.

Rolfe will return again in May with student volunteers from the universities of California at Los Angeles and Berkeley. Dentists from many countries -- including Switzerland, Finland, India and Britain -- have also offered to volunteer in May.

Rolfe's long-term plans include recruiting a Farsi-speaking dentist to staff the clinic full time.

Lisagor said he hopes to join Rolfe in May, too, but "I'd like to see if things are safe at the time," he said. "I'm a risk-taker, but sometimes there are places my wife won't let me go."

The U.S. Department of State is still warning Americans against traveling to Afghanistan. Doctors Without Borders, an international organization that provides healthcare to countries in need, ceased its operations in Afghanistan in 2004 after five of its volunteers were murdered.

Kamrava, who recently returned from a trip to Iran, says he felt safer on the streets of Iran than he would walking some streets in the San Fernando Valley. However, he does not discount the risk that comes with traveling to Afghanistan.

"There is an absence of law and order," he said. "In the absence of law and order, you have these armed thugs that may pose a threat."

Most citizens are not a threat, he added, and are often profoundly grateful for help.

"I'm not worried about some terrorist or anti-Americans bothering me," said Rolfe, who said he has seen "No Osamas."

"I worry about eating a sandwich with green produce that hasn't been properly washed."

Rolfe has had experience running a dental clinic with few resources. From 1974 to 1982, he lived in a commune in the mountains of Santa Barbara, where he conducted dental work and helped the commune run smoothly off of generators. He also gained experience living off minimal resources while growing up on a farm in Idaho.

"We grew our own food," he said.

Always one to follow his own drummer, he graduated from the University of the Pacific dental school in San Francisco in 1968, then headed south to Orange County.

In 1973, he decided to simply drop out of the corporate world and form a bus caravan. He and several other nomads traveled around California in a bus emblazoned with the words, "The Traveling Promised Land."

"We were just a bunch of crazy people," he said.

After a year of roaming, he and many of the others settled in the Santa Barbara commune. He married and divorced more times than he cares to discuss. He has four children and 11 grandchildren -- and a powerful moral compass that continues to guide him.

"There's like this little glimmering thread that I have to follow through this life," he said.