I asked to join in the medical trip with the recent sick people. I guess I'm patient zero, but my concern was not the regular upset stomach etc; I wanted to replace the filling that came out the day before my trip.

After waiting about 2 hours in this van for someone to finish getting their knee looked at we come back to our HQ and I eat lunch, so really I missed another Georgian class for no reason; no problem but still, I eat, brush my teeth and eventually me and another girl go to the dentist. I'm up first. I sit down and have yet another helper with me for translation, except she doesn't know that I'm saying filling; it's not a word they use here. So the guy has a poke around (without gloves) and tells her I'm missing a filling. She tells him 'No, he has a feeling. At this point he starts smacking my teeth with the back of his tools and says that all of my adult teeth have come through. I should mention I'm getting all of this information from my translator who only neglects to mention the filling. At this point I get really frustrated, I'm trying to point, using a mirror, to the hole in my tooth and say it needs to be plugged. Eventually it makes sense to them and they offer me a choice of three fillings; a 35 Lari; a 45 Lari and a 50 Lari filling. I'm not explained the difference and my translator recommends the 35 Lari one. He drills, it hurts like a bitch and then I'm sent to the next chair.

I'm then moved from one chair to another across the room. There are two dentists and about four patients in there, the next dentists does the filling, again with no gloves and instead of the suction straw they just fill the mouth with cotton wool. After that it's pretty close to home. They grab my name and year of birth and put it in a journal. I guess seeing as we should be based in this region that this might be my dentist for the next few months. This scares me should something bad happen.