Hackettstown teen collecting pill bottles for impoverished in Africa

The empty containers can be reused in Malawi, where sometimes only scraps of paper are available to store medication.

Before throwing away that empty pill bottle, consider giving it to Molly Szpakowski.

The Hackettstown teen is collecting cleaned, de-labeled prescription medication containers for use in the impoverished African nation of Malawi.

Molly Szpakowski, a Hackettstown resident and sophomore at Morris Catholic High School, is collecting empty pill bottles for the Malawi Project, which reuses them in the impoverished African nation. (Courtesy photo | For lehighvalleylive.com)

"While we often throw away perfectly good prescription containers, medical pharmacies and hospitals there have nothing but torn pieces of paper for wrapping medicine," said the sophomore at Morris Catholic High School in Denville, New Jersey.

Szpakowski said she is doing the collections to help the Malawi Project, an Indianapolis-based humanitarian group that provides medicinal, educational and other forms of aid to the sub-Saharan nation and others in Africa.

Malawi -- which calls itself "the warm heart of Africa" -- is a country of 17 million people with more than half of its population below the poverty line, according to the Malawi Project's website. The charity says it helps those who want and need assistance, but with the goal of making citizens self-sufficient.

A Malawi Project blog post in March asked for reusable prescription bottles, which it said can keep medication out of children's reach. Within a month, they had collected 20,000 vials.

"The Project sends medical supplies to over 700 medical facilities throughout the country. We will probably never get too many of them," the charity said in a follow-up post.

Szpakowski said her family instilled the importance of volunteerism since she was young, and that she came across the Malawi Project online. The idea of a prescription bottle drive appealed to her aspirations to be a doctor, and to her travels in Europe and Asia for charity work.

"I was able to clean the Black Forest, pick up trash off of the beaches, visit local schools and villages, spend invaluable time with the natives and so much more," Szpakowski said. "I got to experience culture in its purest form and see how
different, yet similar humanity truly is."

She said she started the pill-container drive about two weeks ago and has collected more than 500. She has gotten help from her school, two Warren County churches -- St. James' Episcopal in Hackettstown and Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic in Great Meadows -- and two places in town where she volunteers: the Heath Village retirement community and Hackettstown Regional Medical Center.

Donated containers should be rinsed first, and labels can be removed with boiling water. All kinds of bottles and caps are accepted, Szpakowski said.

The plan is to send the containers to the Malawi Project by Christmastime, but Szpakowski said she hopes it will be an ongoing project.

"Please remember that these containers will help families not only keep their medicine clean but more importantly out of reach of small children," she said. "Moreover, everybody knows that landfills do not need any more plastic, so by helping people of Malawi we are helping ourselves by keeping our Earth clean."

MORE INFORMATION

Anyone interested in donating to Molly Szpakowski's prescription pill container drive for the Malawi Project should email molly.szpakowski@mcstudent.org or call 908-798-8380. All containers should be rinsed and have their labels removed.

For more on the Malawi Project, visit the group's website at malawiproject.org.

Steve Novak may be reached at snovak@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @type2supernovak. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.