Annie Zancanella spent the bulk of her early adult life giving back to the Italian immigrant family that raised her in Glenwood Springs, caretaking for aging family members, even as she dealt with her own health scare.

But a dire cancer prognosis didn’t stop Zancanella, who celebrates her 45th birthday this week, 15 years after her initial diagnosis. 

Instead, it served as motivation to use her dental training to help children learn about proper oral hygiene in the remote tribal communities outside of Arusha, Tanzania — a region of the world that also had a special family connection.

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It’s been a life-saving venture, not only for the thousands of children and adults she brought free dental care to through her Tanzanian Tooth Fairy project, but for herself, too.

In 2017, following a difficult few years when she lost both her parents, two grandparents and an uncle that she had helped care for, she began her new journey in life.

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“I just decided to stop everything, including my own cancer treatments that I’d been doing for close to nine years, and to do something that would make my life feel full of meaning,” Zancanella said.

Even though doctors advised against it, her new passion for helping others turned out to be the treatment she needed.

Seven years later, she’s the boots on the ground as the “Tanzanian Tooth Fairy,” which is now organized as an official nonprofit venture thanks to the help of a group of impassioned local residents and organizations that have supported her efforts. 

Zancanella typically spends the better part of the year in Tanzania, bringing dental and other forms of health care to the remote villages, and teaching children about dental hygiene. She returns to Glenwood Springs for a few months at a time to work odd jobs to help fund her efforts, and to catch up with her sister, Christy, while presenting to various groups about her work. 

Pioneer family

After graduating from Glenwood Springs High School in the late 1990s, Zancanella studied dentistry at CU-Boulder. But she put her career on hold to return home to Glenwood Springs and help tend to family needs.

Annie comes from a long line of Zancanellas, whose Glenwood Springs roots date back to 1876, before the city was even founded, when many Italian immigrants came to work the coal mines in places like Sunlight and South Canyon.

“I did dentist office work at a few places here in the valley, but most of my time was spent caretaking,” she said. 

“I think it’s kind of a lost art, caretaking. You know, our parents take care of us till we’re out of diapers, and we should take care of them when they are in diapers. It’s kind of a big honor, and I have such an incredible family that I wanted to take care of them, and to love and cherish them in those last years.”

Her grandfather and father, Lawrence “Bugo” Zancanella and Lawrence “Buzz” Zancanella, served in succession to each other as Glenwood Springs fire chief, and were well known throughout the community for their many volunteer efforts. 

It was a big change when all of a sudden Annie found herself without those family elders, so she turned to another piece of family history to help reinvent herself.

Annie’s mother, Gracie (Lavergne) Zancanella grew up in New Iberia, Louisiana, where she and her brothers lost their mother at a young age. So, they were essentially raised by “the help,” in Annie’s words — a Tanzanian woman named Juanita.

“It was very uncommon at that time to blend families, especially in the south,” she said. “But, after my grandmother passed, my grandpa (Aaron Lavergne) invited her and her daughters into the house to live with them.”

Her mom and dad met while Buzz, a Navy veteran, was stationed near New Iberia. When they decided to get married in 1966, Gracie asked Juanita to walk her down the aisle. 

Into the bush

Annie’s first trip to Tanzania involved attending the Dental School of Moshi so that she could become government-certified to do dental work in the country. Her studies included certification to be a medical officer, so that she could also help with general health care needs, such as helping deliver babies and dealing with other common health concerns like malaria, typhoid and HIV.

Her regular stays in Tanzania usually lasted about eight months at a time, though she ended up being there almost a full year during the COVID-19 pandemic when she couldn’t easily return home.

“That was an incredible experience, just being out in the bush during that time and not really having any idea what was going on back here,” Zancanella said.

The president of Tanzania at the time, John Magufuli, was a pandemic denier, so they were restricted in reporting the number of respiratory illnesses they were seeing, she said.

After he died — largely rumored to be as a result of COVID — his successor, Samia Suluhu Hassan, affectionately known as “Mama Samia,” has worked to open new channels for health care and education, especially for girls and young women.

Zancanella’s work typically involves flying into remote areas of northern Tanzania and nearby Kenya in a small plane during the early part of the week and staying overnight in the bush, bringing dental care and other health services to the villagers.

The shade under the wing when the plane is on the ground doubles as a clinic.

“We often see hundreds of people a day who have walked for hours, if not days, to meet us and have their babies vaccinated and receive other care,” she said. “We hang a scale from the wing of the plane, and the women are so excited to see how much their babies weigh.”

On Thursdays and Fridays, she spends her time at schools teaching about dental hygiene, and participating in another new passion she developed along the way to making the Tanzanian Tooth Fairy a reality — Rotary, the international service organization that is well known for its global health efforts.

Support back home

Last year, Mark Burrows, who owns Pollinator Chocolate and the Cocoa Club in Carbondale, hosted a fundraiser for Zancanella, whom he had met when he was selling chocolates in Aspen and while she was working a temporary retail job there. 

He also introduced her to the local Rotary Club. 

That club and others in the valley, along with several individual Rotarians, have since contributed substantially to Zancanella’s efforts. 

Zancanella, on her return trip to Tanzania, decided to pay it forward by joining the Rotary Club in Arusha, where she has become active in advocating for better health care services in the rural parts of the country.  

The Rotary partnership continues back home. Just last week she spoke about her work before the Mile High Rotary Club in Denver in an effort to expand fundraising possibilities.

Jim Noyes of Carbondale happened to attend that August 2023 fundraiser at the Cocoa Club on a whim, and was immediately drawn in by Zancanella’s story.  

“In just a few minutes, I learned what an incredible piggy-bank funded mission Annie had been on since 2017,” Noyes said. 

Having visited both Tanzania and Kenya, he was familiar with the need and admired Zancanella’s drive to do good there.

“I knew I could help her raise much-needed funds to supplement the piggy-bank and expand her free dental and medical services,” Noyes said. “I figured Annie was the closest I was ever going to get to Mother Teresa!”

Noyes helped Zancanella form her nonprofit organization, and now serves as the board treasurer. Burrows is vice president of the nonprofit board.

Health education crucial

“Basic dental and medical education, a toothbrush, a small tube of toothpaste, a pulled decaying tooth … These very simple steps make an extraordinary difference to people who have nothing,” Noyes said. “There are no profits to be gleaned from doing this, but the satisfaction from making a difference is invaluable.”

Oral health is critically important to overall health, and oral exams can also lead to the discovery of other health problems, like tuberculosis and early signs of AIDS, she said.

“Our oral hygiene is so important because the mouth is so close to our brain and to the major arteries,” she said. “If an infection gets into your mouth, it can travel into your blood very easily.

“If you have a blood clot from an improperly pulled tooth or an infection, you can get a stroke or a heart attack very easily.” 

Just teaching proper oral hygiene at a young age is very important, because it isn’t always covered adequately in the school curriculum, she said.

The toothbrushes, toothpaste and floss she hands out in schools is often the first the students have ever seen, let alone used. Many grow up using sticks to brush their teeth, sometimes dipped in salt, if they have it, to create an abrasion.

Her lessons include proper boiling of water to rid it of bacteria or eliminate the high concentrations of chlorine that is often used to disinfect the water, but which can be toxic if ingested. 

Zancanella has also seen the effects of villagers relying on witch doctors to try to heal various ailments and even broken bones in children, instead of seeking proper medical treatment. If they run across something more severe in the field, they will arrange to have the child or adult transported to a hospital in the city.

Zancanella doesn’t see herself slowing down anytime soon.

“I feel so happy when I’m there and giving back,” she said. “It makes my heart sing, and this is my life’s mission.”

For more information about the Tanzanian Tooth Fairy project, visit their website: tanzaniantoothfairy.org/

And, to give directly to the cause, visit the organization’s GoFundMe page: https://www.gofundme.com/f/tanzanian-tooth-fairy-project

John Stroud is a freelance writer based in Carbondale and a veteran journalist of 36 years in the Roaring Fork Valley.