Kona dentist Ann Marie Muramoto helped children in Syrian refugee camp

Her first patient was an 8-year-old girl who showed up at the makeshift dental center on her own.

It wasn’t clear what part of the refugee camp she came from, but the self-possessed child was very certain of one thing: She needed to have two teeth pulled.

Kailua-Kona dentist Ann Marie Muramoto asked if the girl had her parent’s consent. The trouble was, she learned through a translator, the girl wasn’t even sure she had parents.

During two and half weeks working with Syrian children in the Zaatari Refugee Camp this past summer, Muramoto rendered aid to many children in similar situations. It helped her remember how lucky she was.

“Some of the kids were really traumatized,” Muramoto said on Friday. “They couldn’t talk anymore. We had only plastic chairs. I would stack up five chairs. We would have them sit in the top chair. Sometimes they were so traumatized they couldn’t sit still.”

Muramoto and the other two dentists in her aid group had a method for bringing stillness to children who could not quiet themselves. They called it the “papoose.”

“I have to lie down first, and the child lays down on top of me, facing upward,” Muramoto says. “Then I have to wrap my leg around their leg, and my arms around them. And I just sing to them.

“Singing is a universal language.”

While Muramoto sang, another dentist came along and gave the anesthetic. And pulled the teeth out.

Safe in a comfortable practice on Kuakini Highway, Muramoto had been under constant bombardment with news of the refugee crisis. She had felt compelled to act.

“I kept thinking, I have to do something,” she said on what spurred her to action.

Then, in January, Muramoto got the email from Flying Doctors about her opportunity.

Her husband and fellow dentist Mark had concerns about the plan; it seemed like a risky trip. She didn’t tell many people she was going.

But it wasn’t the first humanitarian mission that Muramoto, 52, has undertaken in her 30 years as a dentist. Irish by blood but educated by nuns in Britain, she has traveled more than a half dozen places to render aid, including a trip to Ethiopia in the 1980s with Doctors Without Borders.

Her trip this past July to Zaatari in Jordan on the northern border with Syria was in the company of 13 other health care professionals working for the Flying Doctors of America, a group that bills itself as bringing hope to the poorest of the poor.

She saw endless expanses of tents with carpets laid out for floors, people sleeping on the ground. They were librarians, real estate agents — normal people whose lives had been turned upside down.

Muramoto was not allowed to stay in the camp, so she spent long hours on the bus, jouncing over the desert. She heard the thud of bombs dropping over the border, but the locals carried on like that was an everyday occurrence.

And Muramoto saw rotten teeth. Lots of them. When you are in the field, there is no drilling or filling — only pulling — she said. In most cases, it is a medical necessity.

“I would have the patient hold the cup,” she said. “The cup contained the gauze I needed. The patient would act as my assistant. Whatever teeth I extracted I dropped in the cup.”

“I only picked shrapnel out of one lady’s face,” she recalled. “Something had exploded and fractured her top jaw. The guy who went on the mission the year before me pulled shrapnel out of an 8-year-old’s face. So I was prepared for what to expect.”

Muramoto is no stranger to marginalized populations. She worked for 12 years with a mobile dental van to bring care to Hawaii County’s segment of people who likely wouldn’t get it otherwise. She claims to be the first dentist in Kailua-Kona willing to treat those with HIV, offering respite care through the West Hawaii Aids Foundation from 1994 to 2004.

Where others see plague and fear of the other, she sees people. Especially when they’re children.

“Even when you don’t speak the same language, you have held them in your arms,” Muramoto said. “I don’t see them as refugees. I see them as children that need help.”