:: September/October 2004 Volume 3/Number 5

Selfless Service:
Making Peace in the War on Terror

By Felicia M. Tomasko

How does a routine trip to the dentist end up as a mission
of service to a war zone? It probably starts by following your heart. That’s the way yoga teacher Hayley Parlen looks at it.

Hayley may not be your average yoga teacher, and then again, Dr. James Rolfe is not your average dentist. He organizes the nonprofit Afghanistan Dental Relief Project of Santa Barbara, founded to provide both dental care and a clinic and school for the training of dentists in war-torn Afghanistan. Inspired by a trip there where Dr. Rolfe felt as though the care he provided was little more than a drop of water in the desert, he initiated the project and began recruiting others. Parlen, not your average yoga teacher wanted to be of service, as soon as she heard stories and looked at pictures of a previous trip into the war zone. She began planning and saving to travel on the two week May 2004 excursion.

“I teach yoga to kids, I thought that would be something I could do over there.” Parlen felt this was her chance to “put a hand in” as she put it, to give people hope that we as Americans care about them. “Ten percent of Afghani children are orphans.” Most of them are orphans because their parents were killed in the war. While Dr. Rolfe would provide free dental care to women and children, Parlen planned to teach yoga and breathing techniques at orphanages in order to provide trauma relief to kids who don’t receive much attention otherwise.

The reaction of friends and family to Parlen’s upcoming trip varied from concern for her safety to support for her karma yoga. Her teenage yoga students lit candles for her every day she was overseas.

While in Kabul, Parlen’s plan changed. She delivered shoes to children in orphanages that had been collected from kids in California. And she did still teach some yoga classes at an orphanage, leading breathing and community building exercises in room after room, through an interpreter. But, she primarily took on the role of the dental assistant, who had to cancel at the last minute. Parlen assisted Dr. Rolfe with a seemingly endless line of patients, who would enter the clinic, open their mouths and point to where it hurt. Most people had never sat themselves in a dentist’s chair.

“You’re the only dental assistant I know to hold people’s hands,” Dr. Rolfe quipped. For her, it seemed like the natural thing to do. “They were scared and I had a hand free.” Parlen also led the patients through breathing exercises, slowing the pace and amplifying the sound of her own breath, encouraging them to model her breath’s pace and rhythm breaths. Their translator taught them say in the Darhi dialect, “Take a deep breath.”

“Here we were. I was American. They were Afghan. I was holding their hand.” Sometimes she would touch their third eye. “As soon as I did that, they would immediately relax.”

Parlen felt her own yoga practice endowed her with the tools to provide comfort and compassion and the resources to help others relax. Teaching first-time dental patients to relax wasn’t Parlen’s initial vision of what her trip would entail. But, “I did do yoga, a different kind.”

For more information about the Afghanistan Dental Relief Project of Santa Barbara, visit www.adrpinc.org or contact Dr. James Rolfe at 805-963-2329.