Social media and The Malawi Project

Social media.... what more can we say?  It really CAN make a difference!

Last month I noticed a "SHARE" on Facebook regarding the Malawi Project and took it before our club as a possible project:    

Malawi Needs Medicine Bottles
We throw them away. They go to a landfill. After all, what can we use them for after the medicine is gone? It’s those empty medicine bottles. Still clean and new like the day they were born there should be something they can be used for.

There is! You can boil water and clean off the labels and glue and send them to Malawi. So often in the small rural hospitals medicine is dispensed into small torn pieces of newspaper for transportation to village homes. Then where to put them? Where will they be safe? Where will they be out of reach of children? Where will they stay clean?

The Juneau Mendenhall Flying Lions sent off their first box of 79 pill bottles last week to the headquarters in Indiana!  

Here's an update posted on their blog on April 8:  

It was a short post on the Malawi Project Facebook site,” observes a member of the Board of Directors. “Just a simple request for readers to send empty prescription bottles, and the Project would send them to hospitals in Malawi, Africa where they are in very short supply. We expected to receive a couple of thousand of them.” What no one knew was how many people had been saving those little vials for long periods of time, feeling there must be some value for them, but not knowing what it was. No one wanted to send them to the landfill.

After the post, people started sharing. In the first ten days the number of people reached surpassed 600,000. Then it exploded. In just 24 hours the number raced past 1,000,000. Two days later and we were at 2,000,000, and by the time the post was three weeks old it was approaching 5,000,000. Likes, comments and shares were over 200,000.

The race across Facebook has been followed by an equally impressive response from contributors. Empty containers have started pouring into the Indianapolis offices of the Project. In thirty days the total number of vials passed 20,000, and the volume increasing daily.

Keep saving those prescription pill containers everyone!  The address to send them to is:

The Malawi Project, Inc.
3314 Van Tassel Drive
Indianapolis, IN 46240

Be sure to remove the labels and glue first.  

We Serve!
Lion Nancy Norton