Dr. Thomas Blake took his first mission trip in 2000, providing dental care to orphans in Honduras, and he was immediately hooked.

In his Pollyanna world, Blake said, it made him feel like he could make a difference.

That first trip was pretty basic. He loaded up a couple of suitcases with supplies and got on a plane.

By 2009, Blake created his own non-profit, Sonrisas Siempre, and was recruiting other dentists to make annual trips with him.

The mission trips Blake leads aren’t that unusual. Doctors and dentists seem to latch on to particular countries and travel to the same place over and over again, providing free medical care for a few days at a time before heading home.

This month, Blake and a group of 10 other dentists and four dental assistants will make another trip to Honduras, treating students in three different orphanages and traveling to mountain villages to provide care to the have-nots in society.

The orphanages, by the way, aren’t traditional orphanages. They are more centers where parents can send their children because they don’t have enough money to feed them.

Mission trips, though, are a lot more complicated today than they used to be.

In a warehouse downtown Blake has been accumulating dental equipment. Sometime last month, it came time to pack for the upcoming trip. The mere packing process took more than a month. That’s because now, instead of loading up basics, Blake and his fellow dentists have gathered an entire dental clinic – chairs, plumbing equipment, instruments, everything you will find in a dentist’s office – and loaded it into a 40-foot shipping container and shipped it off to Honduras.

Once they arrive in Honduras, the first two days will be spent assembling an entire dental clinic. When they leave, most of the equipment will remain behind. They will have established a clinic that can be used year after year.

The clinics where Blake sets up shop are gorgeous buildings, he said. Often brand-new, they are built by service clubs or churches, but they are completely empty, Blake said.

There seems to be an attitude in Third World countries, Blake said, “If we build it, they will come.”

Indeed, doctors of all types show up.

The equipment that Blake and other doctors will work with is all donated. A retiring dentist might donate some equipment, or a dentist might move his office and buy new equipment and donate the old stuff to Sonrisas Siempre.

Blake has also been working with dentists in other parts of the country, including Connecticut and Arizona, trying to give Sonrisas Siempre a national scope, recruiting enough dentists to cover one little corner of the world.

So far, his efforts have worked out pretty well. During one of his early trips to Honduras he found that every child in one of the orphanages he visited had cavities.

During a visit a few years later, only three children had cavities.

The website for Blake’s organization is www.sonrisassiempre.org.