Shipyard Medical Center

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  I took a little patient to the dentist in Shipyard. Mr. Herman Friesen and his brother are running the dentistry business, called Shipyard Medical Center, located in Camp 10, a short distance from the EMMC church. If doing refills, his fee is $25 per teeth for children and $50 for adults. He did not charge any consultation fee.


  I had heard about this dental clinic years earlier and was curious about it so I did a bit of investigating. Did you know that people from as far away as Alberta in west Canada and Nova Scotia in the east have flown thousands of miles to come to Shipyard for dental care? According to some of my Canadian friends, taking care of teeth in Canada is ridiculously expensive. They say it's cheaper to buy a roundtrip ticket to Belize, pay $200 to have their wisdom teeth pulled, and tour the country a bit than to spend thousands of dollars at a Canadian dentist.
  I don't remember how long this dentistry has been running but their father, David K Friesen, who started it became a sort of legend. He passed away 6 months ago. You can watch part of the funeral service here:https://youtu.be/eA4O9WOHHDw. The video is several hours long and is in Plautdietsch so you can fast forward if you want to. The actual burial was not broadcast though.


  David K Friesen was not only a dentist, he was a doctor. In fact, he was the doctor of Shipyard. Somebody mentioned to me that he had delivered around 2,000 or more babies, both Mennonite and non-Mennonite. He fondly referred to them as his grandchildren and sometimes said, "I have hundreds of grandchildren." Mestizo and Creole women from surrounding villages came to his clinic. Now that he died the baby delivery business has fallen more into the hands of licensed midwives(according to an older man I spoke to), and the dentist operation was taken over by some of his sons. Although he had been part of the Old Colony, by the time of his death he and his children had left the AltKolonie church and are now part of the EMMC church. (This explained the tractors with rubber wheels parked in the garage.)
  Mr. Friesen had a brother who moved to Spanish Lookout many years ago, Abram K Friesen. He also passed away years ago. He was well-known around the Spanish Lookout region as a massage therapist. After his death his widow kept up the massage sessions but I understand she recently remarried so I'm not sure if she still does massages or not.
  I will go back to Shipyard sometime soon again. There are subtle yet significant changes coming soon, and it saddens me in a way to see modernization taking it's toll.

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