I am very passionate on initiatives involving health focussing on oral health.
It all started during a humanitarian mission in a developing country where I recognized the desperate need for dental care in marginalized and poor communities, especially among the children. As a dentist, I knew that if these children received early dental care and oral health education, it would change their lives and bring growth. Coming back from the mission, I gathered a group of aspiring young dentists and doctors under the name Dental Relief Malaysia (DRM) and organized Medical and Dental Awareness Camp (MADAC) to passionately promote oral health as an integral part of children’s well-being.
My journey as humanitarian and have been travelling to multiple countries and my networking experience has been diverse. I had a great opportunity to extend my network while selected to participate in a MyCorps mission to Cambodia (2016) and Lebanon (2017). My work focuses on helping and spreading oral health awareness in vulnerable, community. I organize oral health campaigns, outreach mission, free dental treatment, distribute hygiene kits and und established close contact with the local NGOs . Up to date, I have conducted health camps in Malaysia, Nepal, Laos and Lebanon.
During a revisit mission, our team noted a lot of used toothbrushes dumped at the seashore. Sadly, we found some of those are the toothbrushes distributed by us while conducting outreach health camp at the same area a year ago. Learning from the mistake we created, we were very disappointed with our act as we only cared about the health and not the environment, especially in rural area where they don’t have proper waste management. Thus, we decided to only be giving out bamboo brush in our mission. This is our tiny step towards green initiative.
In 2017 I co-founded Little Happiness Project (LHP). LHP is a social enterprise that sells bamboo toothbrushes to generate income to fund programs for DRM. Running on a “buy one, give one” basis, all profit gained from the sale will be channelled to run health-related camps. To date, through the combined efforts, we have sold more than 600 bamboo toothbrushes, successfully conducted 7 medical and dental camps, trained 20 volunteers, and provided screening for 300 patients. We look forward to care for our community dental health and our environment.
Conducting a health-related camp required a good budget. Through partnership with international donor and agencies, I hope I can do more initiative to improve access to oral health care among marginalized community.
Malaysia 