For Dr. Julie Spaniel, DDS, dentistry is about a whole lot more than cleaning teeth and casting crowns. Spaniel, who has owned her own practice, Sprucewood Dental in South Burlington, for 22 years, says, "It's not about teeth, it's about humanity, it's about people." That attitude has kept her Vermont practice thriving and motivated her to volunteer in Ghana, Honduras, Nicaragua, and here in Vermont with the growing refugee community. "And," she adds, "for women, dentistry is a wonderful field." For Spaniel and the 15 women who make up her practice, the field offers financial rewards along with the freedom and flexibility to raise a family and follow dreams.

Spaniel, 51, a Michigan native, became a dentist because she viewed it as a means to combine her interests in health care, science, and art. "All dentists are artists," she explains. "We create smiles with our hands. I actually build teeth." Back in the '80s, however, she was one of only two women pursuing dentistry at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. "Women have gotten a bad rap. They often counted as only half a dentist because they're going to go off and have kids." Spaniel laughs at that notion. She raised four children, now in their teens and twenties, while working full-time. "I would bring them to the office in their car seats. Sometimes I'd get a babysitter to help." Many of her employees are raising families now and take advantage of the job-sharing options offered at Sprucewood.

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The call for volunteers posted to http://greecevol.info had my name written all over it. “Doulas Wanted,” it said. I had long wanted to go to Greece to do what I could for refugees there, and my hope was to bring to women refugees my experience as a doula and women’s health advocate. So I contacted the woman in Montreal, also a doula, who had posted the call on behalf of Birth Companions International (BCI), a small organization she had recently founded. Within a matter of months, I was in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city, and Polycastro, a small town north of the city where the Nea Kavala Refugee Camp is run by the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).

Luckily, I had enticed a physician friend, Brigitte Dunais from France with whom I’d volunteered in Somaliland in 2011, to join me. Her language skills include fluent Greek, since she lives there part-time, and her medical expertise was bound to be useful. Looking back now, I can’t imagine going there without a companion.

I arrived two days ahead of Brigitte and was blessed with an Airbnb host, Panos, who proved to be a lifesaver. On my first day in the complex city, he agreed to help me find the apartment of the first pregnant woman I was to visit. Without him, I never would have found the place since Google maps were inaccurate and both paper maps and street names were written in miniscule Greek.

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The warm spring sun was low in the sky on the late afternoon of May 12, 2017, as Diane Gayer stood on the front deck of GreenTARA Space, a gallery housed in a renovated church. She was busy welcoming guests to the opening exhibition of this newest addition to northern Vermont’s art and culture scene, located on Route 2 in Grand Isle. The atmosphere was celebratory at this long-anticipated event: over the course of the past year, word had gotten out among local artists that this former Catholic church would soon be transformed into a home for art, contemplation, and community.

As the guests admired the elegant and dramatic photographs of icebergs and receding glaciers by Sarah Holbrook and the soapstone carvings depicting Inuit life by Emil Socher, they also took note of the sensitively handled renovation of the interior space of the church. A trained architect, Gayer was the driving force behind this project from the very beginning, and she will be the curatorial voice and programmer for the gallery in the foreseeable future.

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