Brazilian dentist Felipe Rossi, 38, travels around the world, bringing smiles to some of the poorest people on the planet. In 2016 he founded the Por1sorriso NGO and also became its Fundraising Director. The most amazing part of it all, Rossi and his team fixes the low-income individuals’ teeth for free!
Rossi’s goal is to spread goodness to his community, his loved ones, his country, and the planet. His desire to do good has resulted in massive positive impacts in low-income communities, not just in Brazil but also in Mozambique, Kenya, and elsewhere. His philosophy is ‘to help those who can’t help themselves,’ which is why he doesn’t charge the people he helps.
“This assistance is very different from projects where people simply get toothbrushes and toothpaste,” Rossi wrote on his Instagram.
One of Rossi’s patients, Terri Rimmer, said getting her teeth fixed was painful but had completely changed her life. “Before surgery, my life was just a black hole. I spent years not being able to smile in pictures, and it was always humiliating because people taking pictures in a group setting kept saying, ‘smile’ and I couldn’t do it,” Rimmer said.
Rimmer recalls:
After surgery, I can smile in pictures, and I have confidence! When I put my dentures in for the first time and went into the bathroom at the dentist, I just kept looking at myself in the mirror and smiling. It was like my face was plugged in after all these years! My eyes just lit up, and my face was just lifted! Even my mom and other people noticed.
She mentioned how her missing teeth forced her to give up a lot of her favorite foods, such as fresh cherries and salads. Rimmer’s dental condition was so bad that Rossi had to remove all of her teeth. “I had no bone at all in my upper jaw, so they had to borrow bone from a corpse. They had to remove the top teeth first, which there were only a few of, and the recovery from that was unbearable,” she explained.
For about two weeks, Rimmer was in heavy pain, and it took several months for her to recover fully. “I had an extremely hard time. They put four screws in my mouth and four implants before they could make my dentures,” she said. They gave Rimmer four shots in the roof of the mouth and took four wax molds of her mouth. The medication they prescribed her after surgery upset her stomach so much that she had to stop taking it. “It was painful, but very worth it!” Rimmer remarked.
She explained how people are even treating her better now that she has teeth:
People definitely greet me warmly and want to interact with me more so than when I didn’t have any teeth.
Good oral health is critical, it could be the difference between a healthy life and one prone to illness. Below are some of the before and after photos of people Rossi helped. The pictures reveal how much a dentist can restore a person’s confidence and give them hope.
The video below shows the team on their 2016 ” Mission Africa”, where they went to a poor town and fixed the locals’ teeth.
