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Westminster Christian School senior Beatriz Erdmann is the founder and president of the Operations Smile Club at school.
“Last year 10 of my club members, collected 200 plus dental instruments,” she says. “We packaged, sanitized them, and then I went on a mission trip to a rural part of the Dominican Republic and donated them to a small community called Montellano.”
That village was so remote, it was about five hours away from the Santiago airport, deep in the mountains. She was there on a Blue Missions trip to build latrines for the village.
“I asked if I could bring the instruments to the community we were serving,” she says.
“That was the first time we’ve done it. And I have plans to do it again.”
In order to collect the instruments, she and her club members reached out to all of the pediatric dental offices in Miami and asked for donations.
Although the villages don’t all have official dental offices, the instruments were going to be sent to dental offices a few miles from their community.
“I started the club, because I always wanted to do something in dentistry. I want to become an orthodontist,” she says. “I was looking for ways I could help the community through the club. We came up with the idea of collecting and donating.”
The Operation Smile Club was already collecting money for the mission trips to poor countries to do surgery on cleft palate patients.
“I wanted to do something more hands on and personal,” she says.
She expects another student will take over the club and they’ll take the dental instruments at some point.
She has been accepted to Loyola, LSU, Clemson, Florida State, TCU, and Elon. Erdmann plans to major in psychology while taking a pre-dental track.
“I always wanted to be part of the medical field, my dad is a pediatrician,” she says. “But I never wanted to do medicine. When I was 13 years old, I’d visit my orthodontist, and I always asked questions.”
The summer of her junior year, she contacted her pediatric dentist and asked to shadow him.
“He offered me a job to do normal office work and shadow him,” she says. “I’ve been doing that for two years. It’s definitely kept my interest.”
Over the years she’s participated in two Blue Mission trips, building latrines both times.
“I learned that I really like to help and do community service. I felt like I was being pro-active.,” she says.
She likes how everyone is living in the moment while on the trips because they are not on their phones.
At school, she’s co-founder and vice-president of LA 6, a club in honor of Lucas Alvarez, a Westminster student who died in boating accident in 2020. She started the club with his brother, Lance Alvarez.
“The whole club is run under the LA 6 Foundation,” she says. “They raise money to fund scholarships for college kids who can’t afford to pay full tuition. This year we’re starting a new fundraiser. Lucas played lacrosse. We’re hosting an invitational tournament for boys and girls. It should be in May.”
She’s working on a seven-on-seven tournament with the help of the Alvarez’s parents.
Erdmann is a member of the National Honor Society, the Foreign Language Honor Society, the Science National Honor Society, Rho Kappa, the Computer Science National Honor Society, Mu Alpha Theta and she plays lacrosse and basketball for Westminster.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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