Mamoloko finds her passion in dentistry
Dr Mamoloko Mackoline Pula is passionate about restoring smiles.
POLOKWANE – The 45-year-old dentist from Bendor is in the business of restoring people’s confidence through their smiles. Growing up, she wanted to be a doctor but wasn’t accepted at Medunsa and was advised to study dentistry for the first year and study medicine the next year.
“What they forgot to tell me was that I needed to get two distinctions in order to switch my degree to medicine, which I wasn’t able to do. It was a blessing in disguise because I fell in love with dentistry and haven’t looked back since,” she said.
Pula loves to work with her hands and believes to be a dentist is a combination of art and science. She qualified as a dentist in 2000 and worked in government for three years before she started her own practice 18 years ago.
“It was an adjustment as with my own practice, I had to learn how to do the admin and run a business. To have people report to you changes a lot of things,” she said.
Outside of work, Pula is a wife, mother and a woman of the church. She said she juggles these different hats well because women have that special ability and she has tremendous support from her husband.
“I am a parent who wants to be active in my children’s lives. I take them to school in the mornings because I want to spend as much time as I possibly can with them,” she said.
In her free time, Pula likes to spend time with her sister, who is a beautician that pampers her, and she enjoys running and going to church when she is not travelling.
She shared that she started to run when she turned 41 because she needed to make a lifestyle change.
“I didn’t look the way I do today and I was on the verge of giving up my career because I had back problems that made it difficult to work effectively. Since I changed my lifestyle, it has positively benefited my career,” she said.
Pula urged more young black people to join the dentistry field because there is still a need to break barriers. This will also change the mindset that going to the dentist is for a certain class or race. “We need to create more awareness about the importance of visiting the dentist every six months,” she said.
