Kristine Tran DDS
San Diego, CA
Funding: Mission Trips
For four days in May 2018, 11 hours a day, Kristine Tran DDS performed dentistry on about 80 village children in poverty-stricken Paynesville, Liberia, just a few hundred miles above the equator in Africa. “Not only had none ever been to the dentist,” Tran said, “they didn’t even know what a dentist was. It was like, ‘Oh my God, who is that woman and why is she doing that?’”
Tran feels obligated to pay forward the compassion showed her by strangers when she was a 9-year-old girl running from the Communists in South Vietnam.
“If you see a documentary from 1975, my family were among the boat people,” Tran said. “We were on a fishing boat, in a sea full of dead bodies, with people yelling, screaming and crying. I remember a lot of it.
Tran, her parents and her nine brothers and sisters were rescued by the U.S.S. Midway and brought to Camp Pendleton, where they lived in tents while awaiting a sponsor — in their lucky case, a Catholic Church in El Cajon.
Website: https://www.lajollalight.com/lifestyle/sd-cm-ljl-dental-implant-20180618-
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