News

Minus Malaria Variety Show to fund bednets

In print | February 19, 2009

The Swarthmore Global Health Forum will be hosting the college’s first annual variety show in Science Center 101 on Friday, Feb. 20 in order to raise money for the Minus Malaria Initiative. The anti-malaria campaign, launched by the GHF, distributes insecticide-treated bednets in Uganda and Sierra Leone and organizes educational presentations on what health precautions are necessary to prevent malaria.

The show will feature a number of 15 minute long volunteer performances by Mixed Company, Essence of Soul, Sixteen Feet, Vertigo-Go, the Mariachi Band, Rhythm n’ Motion, Capoeira and the Balkan Brass Band.

“One of the reasons that Sixteen Feet and myself included wanted to get involved is because of the work that the Global Health Forum does, especially in terms of Minus Malaria, and how intensely they have been pursuing their mission,” member of Sixteen Feet G Patrick ’10 said. “As a person who is outside of the group, I don’t have the time to be invested in it myself, but the fact that someone is invested in giving that kind of help is something I want to be involved in … without having to leave the comfort of what we usually do.”

In place of an admission fee, Minus Malaria is requesting a donation of two to five dollars. The first three rows of seats are reserved for members of the faculty, staff and larger community who donate twenty dollars or more.

Throughout the event, Minus Malaria will provide information about the campaign and how donated money will ultimately be spent.

The variety show will make up the crux of the Minus Malaria campaign, a reflection of the Global Health Forum’s commitment to integrating activism with life at Swarthmore.

“We wanted to make the campaign pervasive and part of student life,” said Sahiba Gill ’12, GHF’s Event Coordinator.

Minus Malaria is using the variety show to kick off a weeklong fundraiser. The proceeds from the fundraiser will be used directly to purchase five hundred insecticide-treated bednets for a target village. “We’re trying to blanket one entire village to show what a difference bednets can make,” Gill said. “Essentially, we’re trying to eradicate malaria in one spot.”

In the week following the show, Minus Malaria will continue the fundraising campaign with tabling in Shane Lounge and Sharples. Since each bednet costs about ten dollars, their goal to raise a total of $5,000 this time around, a sum equal to what they raised for the same cause last year. “The thing with bednets is, once you’ve covered 80 percent or so of a community, the community is pretty covered because the bednets have insecticide in them, so that kills mosquitoes which carry the vectors,” said Mi Zheng ’11, Executive Board Member and Network Coordinator for the GHF.

A further goal of the Global Health Forum is to inspire students at other colleges to take up the fight against the disease. “Minus Malaria is something we’re hoping to spread across the U.S. where students on different campuses all do events related to malaria, both fundraising and education, looking at malaria from a variety of different perspectives,” Zheng said.

Every year, between one and three million people die of malaria, an estimated 70 percent of which are children under the age of five. The Minus Malaria Initiative is concentrating its humanitarian efforts in Uganda and Sierra Leone, primarily because the GHF leadership has public health contacts in the region.

“Basically all of Sub-Saharan Africa is malaria endemic, and it just happens that the founder of Global Health Forum did work in Uganda and does have contacts in the Acholi Quarter, and then one of our current board members works with a malnutrition organization that does very specific work in Sierra Leone,” Gill said. “We’re trying to make a really grassroots effort to cover a village, and to do that you do need contacts in the area.”

The Forum’s next major project will be to collect Crocs shoes to be sent back to the Crocs Company.

Once the company receives the shoes, they melt them down and make new Crocs, which they send to areas of third world countries in which people are in desperate need of footwear.
“People tend to get cuts and then infections on their feet which spread to their entire bodies,” Gill said. “It’s very preventable.”

The efforts of GHF are funded by the Pericles Grant, created by Eugene M. Lang and the Swarthmore College Board of Managers in 2005. The purpose of the fund is to support groups of students in their implementation of projects to address major social and civic issues.