How many lives have you improved over the last five years? Kenneth Kirkham ’83, D.D.S , can claim roughly 10,000. In 2000, along with the Rev. Mark Hanshaw, Kirkham launched Hands of Healing.

Hands of Healing sends medical and dental health professionals to South and Central America and Mexico to treat everything from abscessed teeth to heart disease. “For most of the people we treat,” says Kirkham, “we are both the first and the last dentists they will ever see.”

Hands of Healing received non-profit status in 2005, and has donated $2 million in health care services since its inception. Two dozen teams have treated more than 10,000 people in Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Guatemala and — as of February 2006 — India.

Although the 20-25 physicians, dentists, vets, nurses, and technicians who volunteer for each trip pay their own airfare, hotels and food, this is no holiday.  The teams see between 150 to 400 people in a typical day, which begins after traveling two hours or more in country by bus to remote mountain regions.

In Spanish-speaking countries, translators relate patients’ complaints to the medical team. Hands of Healing teams also rely on the support of local communities to translate Mayan and other indigenous languages into Spanish.

The relief and gratitude glimpsed on the faces of patients, however, needs no translation. It is what inspires Kirkham and his colleagues to spend their holidays working gratis in primitive conditions — and what keeps them coming back year after year. “I find that if I haven’t been on a mission in a year or so I feel a void,” says Kirkham. “I get so much from it. I can say it is the only thing in my life that I do unconditionally.”