Are you looking for a simple, one-issue world mission project to catch and hold the attention of the children in your congregation? The Malaria Bednet Project may suit your purpose well. It involves our general concern for health care for underprivileged people while illustrating the role global missions play in treating the whole person: soul, body and mind. Each bednet "unit" costs only $10, making it easy to promote for individual gifts and to set goals in multiples of $10.

To stimulate interest in this project, several resource materials have been prepared for your use: 1) A sample presentation, which you will find below. This presentation is also printed on a flyer which you can order free of charge from Global Health Ministries. 2) An activity folder, which you can also order free of charge. This folder contains a coloring page, a crossword puzzle, a cut-out project and a story about a Malagasy brother and sister. The folder is also suitable for use as a children's church bulletin. These may be photocopied and folded for distribution.

As part of the children's activity folder, you may wish to make use of the cut-out project to make an offering bank from an empty soup can. Soup can bank lids may be ordered through a novelty mail order company or the banks can be used with an open top.

Monies that are gathered should be sent to Global Health Ministries. Please refer to Project #95-04 (Malaria Bednet Project) in your donation.

Bednet Project Presentation

The following may be presented in a question-answer format or simply used as the basis for a short talk. A map or globe to show the relative positions of the United States and Madagascar would be very helpful.

A. Today I would like to take you on a little journey to Madagascar, a large island shaped like a left foot, in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Africa. Madagascar is on the opposite side of the world from the United States and is opposite in other ways too. When we have daylight the Malagasy people have night, our wintertime is hot summer for them, the sun shines on the north side of a house, not the south as it is for us, and the coldest winds blow in from the South Pole. There are some large cities but most of the nine million Malagasy people live in small rural villages. Depending on the rainfall, they grow rice, sweet potatoes or corn and a few vegetables. Most of the people are quite poor. The average income is less than $300 a year.

Q. Why should we be interested in Madagascar?

A. All of the countries and peoples of the world are important. The Lutheran churches in Madagascar have requested pastors, teachers, agriculturalists and medical personnel to work with them. American missionaries tell about special needs in Madagascar.

Q. What are those needs?

A. I'll talk about just one. Have you ever been bitten by a mosquito or lain awake listening to mosquitoes buzz in the darkness? It's kind of annoying, isn't it? And then you'll have some bites to scratch for a few days. A lot of people in Madagascar end up with more than a bite to scratch. They get a high fever, then chills, and are very sick because the kind of mosquito they have there carries the parasite that causes malaria, a serious tropical disease.

Medicine will treat the disease, but most of the people live too far away from a doctor to get help. The female Anopheles mosquito (the kind found in the tropics) carries malaria from sick people to well people, so it's possible to get malaria many times and even to die from it.

Q. So what can be done about it?

A. The best way is to stop the mosquitoes that carry the disease. Since mosquitoes are most active at night, people need to sleep under a bednet that keeps out the mosquitoes. This is even more effective if the net is treated with insecticide that is safe for humans but will kill mosquitoes that land on the net. This protects people from getting malaria.

Q. What are these bednets like?

A. They are made from many yards of cloth netting or mesh material sewn together to form a large "box" the size of a bed with strings at the four corners to hold it up.

Q. Do many Malagasy people have bednets?

A. Not yet. It's a new idea for poor rural people. Madagascar is a poor country with few resources. Most people could not afford the bednets.

Q. Are the treated bednets expensive?

A. Not by our standards. One bednet costs $10. At our church-related hospitals and clinics, the nets are soaked in about two quarts of insecticide and then dried. The insecticide will kill mosquitoes for six months. The net will last about five years and the insecticide treatment is not expensive. Four or five people will sleep under one bednet.

Q. So can we do something to help these families?

A. YES! Our help is needed to purchase bednets. This is a good way for us to be in partnership with people who have less than we do -- we can pay for the bednet and they pay the lesser cost of the insecticide treatment.