Lilongwe, Malawi … “It has been nearly 20 years since we met Nurse Colette in a small rural hospital far away from the main highway. She was the only person on staff the day we arrived with supplies and she was so delighted to see us. I will never forget her, or the thing she said to our medical director about the need for rubber gloves to protect the medical staff.” Dick Stephens recalls from long ago.
“I was stunned when Colette confided in me that she knew she would die of AIDS,” Suzi remembers. Innocently I asked her how far along it had progressed. She said, “O no, I do not have it yet, but I know I will contact it as I work each day caring for ill patients and I never have rubber gloves to protect myself.”
Suzi then remembers how she was able to go through the in coming supplies and pull out a box of 100 pair of rubber gloves for Colette. “First Colette began to cry, then we were both crying over the gift of the life saving box of gloves,” Suzi relates.
Since that day 20 years ago, the Malawi Project has shipped well over 20-million-dollars in medical aid to over 600 hospitals, and still today there is the constant need for such simple things as a pair of rubber gloves.
Suzi notes, “It is the same every years as we go from hospital to hospital all over the country. This year we visited 17 medical facilites and it was the same everywhere we went. So much need! So few supplies! Life-saving gloves are up near the top of the list! After all, without them the medical people have a high chance of getting bodily fluids in a small cut or abrasion and contracting HIV/Aids.
Send a Box Today
100 pair of rubber gloves in the U.S. cost between $8.00 and $15.00. These can easily be purchased at any drug store and sent to the Malawi Project to be shipped to Malawi. Send to: Malawi Project, 3314 Van Tassel Drive, Indianapolis, IN 46240. What greater gift can be given this time of year than to give the gift of gloves that can save the life of that medical person?
Part of the surgical staff at the district hospital in Zomba posed for this picture to illustrate the need for gloves.