Volume 8 • 2021 • Issue 5

In his fourth year, Dr. Cassim applied to travel to Ethiopia to teach at the dental school for two weeks and was accepted. He worked with Dr. Rosenbloom and two other dentists to create the curriculum. “The first thing that happened when we arrived in Addis Ababa was the bags of dental supplies that we needed to teach with were seized by customs at the airport,” Dr. Cassim says with a smile. “But it was a lesson in itself, we had to be adaptable and think on the fly.” Despite not having supplies to use in the classroom for the first week, Dr. Cassim enjoyed teaching at Addis Ababa University. He found the students impressive and he was interested to see how different the dental school was from U of T. In teams of two, the dentists and dental students from U of T taught small interactive seminars to teach pre-clinical, hands-on skills. “We’d do a quick 30-minute mini-lecture and then we’d work on plastic models, prepping for a filling or restoring it with a filling material,” he says. “And then after we were done, the students would go on to the next team and do another seminar. We tried to maximize what we could communicate in a short period.” It was Dr. Cassim’s first time teaching dentistry. “And I couldn’t wait to do it again,” he says. Dentistry For Kids After he graduated, Dr. Cassim did a residency at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and then decided to return to U of T to study pediatric dentistry. “About half the population of Ethiopia is under the age of 18, so, in the back of my mind, I began to think about how a pediatric dentistry curriculum would be appropriate to teach there.” When asked how he knew that pediatric dentistry was what he wanted to focus on , Dr. Cassim says that he’s always enjoyed working with kids. “Starting as a teenager, I taught karate, basketball, badminton, arts and crafts. You name it, I’ve taught it You realize that teeth aren’talwaysthenumber one priority, and there is a whole person that you are treating. “But it was the residency at Sick Kids that solidified it for me,” Dr. Cassim says. Often the children he cared for had very serious health problems. “It kind of puts everything in perspective,” he says. “You realize that teeth aren’t always the number one priority, and there is a whole person that you are treating. But then I also felt very useful, because sometimes a heart transplant or a bone marrow transplant isn’t possible until a dental infection has been cured.” For the research portion of his specialty program, Dr. Cassim worked with Dr. Laura Dempster, whose research at U of T is related to teaching and learning in the health professions. Dr. Cassim in Ethiopia. Dr. Cassim (c.) with his colleagues at Addis Ababa University. to kids,” he says. He tutored at-risk teens as a undergraduate at McMaster and, at U of T, created Junior Smiles, a community outreach program that provided workshops for kids and their families about oral health and preventive dental care. 31 Issue 5 | 2021 | Issues and People