LITTLE FRIENDS INTERNATIONAL, INC.

a 501 (c) (3) non-profit

 

THE HONDURAS 2008 TRIP; GREATER CHALLENGES 

 

 

 

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This year's trip was accomplished by a great staff of volunteers, who had the extra challenges brought about by the floods endured in Honduras this fall. We split up our personnel and sent people to the tent cities that exhausted Hondurans fled to, for protection from rising waters and mudslides, one of which buried an entire village and left no survivors. We used all of our resources to do everything we could for these brave people.

  Please see new release about Kirby Lester's donation below.

 

NEWS RELEASE

 

For Immediate Release Contact: Mike Stotz

December 18, 2008 mstotz@kirbylester.com, 847.984.0320

 

Kirby Lester Donation Aids Honduras Flood Victims

 

Lake Forest, IL (December 18, 2008) – Using a tablet counter donated by Kirby Lester, LLC, the Little Friends International group efficiently dispensed more than 100,000 vitamin tablets and filled 3,700 prescriptions to help flood victims in Honduras’ second-largest city.

 

Little Friends International (in partnership with Cure International) sent a team of physicians, nurses, dentists and other volunteers, plus almost seven tons of supplies for a massive humanitarian project in San Pedro Sula in the northeast corner of Honduras. A donated Kirby Lester “gold-standard” KL15e tablet counter was among the medical equipment shipped to Honduras.

 

The Little Friends team treated more than 3,000 Hondurans, many of whom were displaced by devastating floods in October. Each patient was given 30 vitamin tablets, in addition to any necessary prescription medications. Using the Kirby Lester counter, the four-person field pharmacy staff finished packing all

medications and vitamins in less than five days, or about 25 percent less time than it would have taken with hand-counting.

 

“This was the first time we dispensed vitamins to each patient and to every member of the patient’s family. This presented an unexpected amount of work for our pharmacy. The Kirby Lester machine was a godsend. Our volunteers were fighting over who got to use it next,” says Dr. Mary Pergiovanni, founder and president of Little Friends International. “Honduras endures about 95 percent humidity with frequent rains – that is not an ideal environment for any machine. We worked the Kirby Lester very hard, and it held up perfectly.”

 

Kirby Lester frequently donates its counting technology for humanitarian causes as well as pharmacy schools. Recent donations have included tablet counters to African Youth Outreach for its work with AIDS patients in Africa and the pharmacy schools at Purdue University, University of Illinois-Chicago, West Virginia University and Ohio Northern University.

 

“Kirby Lester is proud to continue its long-standing tradition of donating to important causes,” says Christopher Thomsen, Kirby Lester’s Vice President of Business Development. “It is truly inspiring to see organizations like Little Friends use our technology to help those in need.”

 

About Kirby Lester

Kirby Lester was established in 1971 and maintains the largest market share of automatic tablet/capsule counter sales in the United States and Canada, plus 35 other countries. More Kirby Lester counters are used to dispense prescriptions in retail, mail order, hospital and long-term care pharmacies and manufacturing facilities than any other automated counting system; almost 30,000 pharmacies worldwide rely on Kirby Lester for their counting needs…exactly! For more information, contact Kirby Lester at 847.984.3377 or www.kirbylester.com.