By Victoria Starbuck, Staff Writer

Published in print Feb. 25, 2015

A new opportunity to serve has come to the UNCG campus. On Mondays and Wednesdays, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Regina Da Silva and other volunteers will be in the EUC Atrium, collecting empty medicine bottles to aid in the distribution of medicine in Mozambique.

Doctors of Mozambique do not have access to containers that effectively protect the medicine they provide to their patients.

By providing them with used medicine bottles, Da Silva hopes to lower the spread of infection via poor containers. People who bring in five medicine bottle will receive a coupon voucher for a free Grande Starbucks Coffee. The only requirement is that the bottles are clear in color.

Da Silva hopes to collect five hundred or more medicine bottles during this drive. In 2012 she collected one hundred from her high school.

Because UNCG is a larger community, she believes that we can collect more than five hundred medicine bottles to send to the doctors in Mozambique.

The drive is open to students, staff, faculty, and the wider community.

Medicine bottles will provide the doctors of Mozambique with the means to safely distribute medicine to their patients.

Currently, doctors in the country use plastic bags to distribute medicine to patients. This causes problems as it makes the medicine susceptible to various viruses and diseases that the patient will later ingest.

Da Silva is working around the UNCG motto to serve the community.

However, she has found that the community does not reach as far as she wishes it would.

“We haven’t extended the motto of service globally,” said Da Silva. “This is a project that I’m putting out there for UNCG to reach the motto of service at a global level.”

She hopes this project will create an initiative for service across borders. When she began the process of organizing a service project in 2012, she was unsure what direction would be the most beneficial.

After asking her parents, who are missionaries in Mozambique, she decided to collect medicine bottles. Medicine is vital in this developing country.

Da Silva’s mother caught Malaria twice and both times the medicine was delivered in plastic bags that provided less protection than the plastic bags we are used to seeing in America.

Da Silva believes that this project is ideal for the UNCG community because it expands the University’s motto of service internationally. It is a project that Da Silva knows the UNCG community can accomplish.

Funds often run dry for college students, but the collection of medicine bottles allows students to give without having to do so sparingly.

After Da Silva has finished the collection on April 17, she will remove the labels, wash, and package the bottles.

Da Silva will ensure that the labels are properly disposed of and the bottles sanitized before packing them up to ship to Mozambique.

For Da Silva, this project is just the beginning of global engagement; “I’m just trying to change the world one bottle at a time.”