Dental Clinics Across the Pacific Create Self-Reliant Smiles

Dental clinics operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are promoting oral health and greater self-reliance in the South Pacific.

There are currently three clinics in this area of the world located on Church-operated high school campuses and are all staffed by volunteers.

Clinics are located on the Pesega High School campus in Apia, Samoa, one on the Liahona High School campus in Nuku’alofa, Tonga, and one on the Moroni High School campus in Kiribati.

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The Church owns and operates the clinics in Samoa and Tonga, while the one in Kiribati is currently owned by Charity Vision, a nonprofit organization based in Utah.

Each clinic is to first provide dental care for all full-time missionaries and those preparing to serve missions, then care for Church school students and then the public.

The primary focus of the clinics is to support the missionary department’s needs, and the secondary purpose is to help the country become self-reliant. In 2025, the Church’s humanitarian strategy for the Pacific Area placed dental self-reliance at the heart of health initiatives. That meant empowering communities to lead their own dental care efforts through teaching dental hygienist courses to young adults in the area.

Sister Amy Martin is the health advisor for the Marshall Islands/Kiribati Mission. Her primary role is to assist in teaching the Advanced Function Dental Hygienist Training to clinic volunteers.

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This training covers anatomy, medical emergencies, public health, and oral pathology, among other topics. As part of this training, students are also assigned projects to increase community outreach.

One outreach project involved creating a program to teach elementary school children about oral health. With the acceptance of this challenge, student hygienists prepared a fun and interactive presentation complete with visual aids, songs, demonstrations and toothbrushes as prizes to promote oral hygiene education. The presentation was given to over one thousand students, with many happily humming the songs they’d learned as they returned to their classwork.

Elder and Sister Couch are full-time senior missionaries serving as Pacific Area Dental Specialists.

Sister Couch spoke about how offering dental hygienist training helps create a more self-reliant community.

“We want to educate the community so these young adults have a desire to go into this field so that then they can give back and support their community and provide for their families,” Sister Couch said. “It really is full circle.”

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As a seasoned dentist, Elder Couch explained how oral health touches all aspects of overall health. Along with affecting other areas of a person’s physical health, such as their immune system, pain and infection in the mouth can also have a significant effect on a person’s emotional well-being. In the Pacific, oral health isn’t just a medical issue but a humanitarian one. 

Patients said that having their teeth cleaned has been a blessing in their lives. The implementation of the clinics in the Pacific has created more opportunities for them to receive the help and treatment they need. In Kiribati, the Moroni clinic has five chairs for hygiene, the hospital dental clinic has only one.

One patient said, “If I didn’t come to the clinic, I would just take Panadol.”

When asked what they would like volunteers at the dental clinic who have served them to know, one patient simply said, “Thank you.”

The work of the dental clinics is all about compassion. It is about caring for the needy and those who are often forgotten and overlooked. Jesus Christ’s ministry was filled with doing just this, we are asked to follow His example and to, “love thy neighbour as thyself” (Matthew 22:39).

At the Pacific Dental Conference held in Fiji in August 2025, Pacific Area Welfare and Self-Reliance Manager, Arama Puriri stated that the clinics aren’t just about fixing teeth but about creating resilience.