Orly’s Story

  Recently, ENP gave all of the interns the fantastic opportunity to hear a Dental student, one of ENP’s scholars, a chance to share her outstanding story with us. She started off by giving us the basic information about her dentistry journey; such as where she goes to school, how long the program is, how she knew she wanted to pursue dentistry, bad experiences in her career, etc. The 26 year old goes to the University of Jerusalem and is in the middle of her 7 year program. She explained how both medicine students and dentistry students have to go through 3 years of medicine school, 3 years in a clinic and one year shadowing a doctor in the field of desire. Orly shared how she always knew she wanted to help people, but didn’t know how she wanted to pursue this. When the art of dentistry got introduced to her she fell in love with it. Her father had diabetes, which caused her to study the facts related to diabetes and the mouth and soon found herself very interested in dentistry . She was so interested that she told us some impressive facts, showing her passion. Orly then told us about an unenjoyable experience in the workplace that steered her away from pharmacy. Constantly patients would get frustrated with her for mistakes the doctors would make. Similarly, she spoke about another stressful situation, but this time it had to do with race. One day she was assigned to take care of a patient, however the patient did not want her to treat him because she is a black woman. Although this is blatant racism, she handled the complication with maturity. She told him someone else would have to take care of him, but he would need to wait for the next non black student to treat him. 

Following the career conversation was a conversation about her family's journey to Israel. Orly’s father wanted to move to Israel so badly that he started his journey on foot. On his way he saw many traumatizing things which ultimately made him give up. Later, he made his way to his dreamland through Operation Solomon. The first thing he did after getting out of a cramped trunk he and several Ethiopians were being snuck in through, was kiss the land. They have finally made their way to the place they came from, the place where the Jews belong. Later, Orly’s mother crossed paths with her father, had Orly and then had 5 other beautiful children. 

-Shari Spiegel