DAMASCUS (Middle East Eye) – The business chief grabs a large copper coffee pot off the counter and pours scorching black cardamom-flavored liquid into the plastic cups of his regulars.
They chatter while twisting their rosaries, sitting on chairs facing the street, in the popular district of Abi Samra, on the heights of Tripoli in northern Lebanon.
Oussama swallows the last sip in a single gulp from a colorful traditional cup that always finds a place in his large briefcase. Then he pulls out a blue mould for the teeth impressions. He then mixes a yellow powder, alginate, with water.
A viscous paste quickly forms, which he spreads in the mould. He disinfects his hands and plunges the mixture into the mouth of his client, a former employee of Middle East Airlines, the national flag-carrier airline of Lebanon. The elegant widower in his sixties, dressed in a chequered shirt and a navy blue waistcoat, has his dentures fitted.
“Some of my teeth were still standing, but it was too expensive for me to fix them, so I preferred to have them pulled out and fitted with dentures. It’s more aesthetic and practical,” he tells Middle East Eye, watching Oussama’s gestures with a slightly anxious look.
At the end of the operation, he hands Oussama 50 dollars, half the bill. He will pay the second half upon delivery of the dentures.
In the cafe, customers are accustomed to the scene. They know Oussama well. One of them has already had dentures made in the same place, after a debilitating time in jail. A few weeks earlier, a Syrian journalist had given himself there a new white-toothed smile.
“I learned the trade from my father, by watching him do it, and by accompanying him to his clients. At the Doms, we are prosthetists from generation to generation, we exchange a lot between us to improve ourselves,” says Oussama.
The expertise of Doms is in demand, because their prices are two to three times lower than those of dentists. Oussama sells his dentures for $100, compared to $200 to $250 in private practice. They can also give appointments very quickly, on the same day with just a phone call.
Itinerant prosthetists did not just appear with the financial collapse; they were there several decades earlier. It is a phenomenon that became particularly visible since the emergence of a neoliberal economy where health services were gradually privatized, as explained by the Italian researcher Giovanni Bochi in his work on prosthetists in northern Lebanon.
The latter has a particularity: they come from the community of Doms, “gypsies” from the Middle East, often referred to by the term nawar in Arab countries. The community, with a semi-nomadic way of life, is dispersed across several countries, mainly in Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan. The prosthetist Doms are often referred to by the word qurbat, a term whose exact meaning no one knows.
These men are specialized in the manufacture of dentures, but also in the installation of bridges and teeth in gold or silver.