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How can tourists bring medical supplies to places of need?

Typically, suitcases brought on vacation are filled with clothes, toiletries, and toiletries, not filled with medical supplies.

But volunteers from the nonprofit Not Just Tourists are bringing a humanitarian side to leisure travel by carrying medical supplies in their luggage to donate to those in need.

Avi D’Sousa, founder of the Toronto chapter of Not Just Tourists, showed CTV National News boxes of supplies, ready to be packed into suitcases.

“Gasps and IVs, needles, ventilators and most of all a mask,” he said.

Those are some of the things that Sonya Deol will bring with her to South Africa as a humanitarian medical gift.

Deol told CTV News: “I usually travel with a backpack, so my allowed baggage allowance is wasted. “And then one day, while doing some research, I found Not Just Travelers and I thought, what a perfect way to supply needs, share resources, and travel at the same time. calendar.”

The supplies collected by Not Just Tourists are mainly donated hospitals and home care facilities. The Toronto branch has a partnership with the University Health Network, which donates supplies that are accumulating and at risk of going to waste.

Travelers receive a suitcase from the organization along with a pre-filled form for customs.

The baggage is then sent to a specific hospital or clinic abroad. The medical facility that receives the donation is pre-selected by Not Just Tourists to ensure supplies reach where they are needed.

Eileen Hannon was carrying a suitcase on a trip to Cuba, fulfilling a grieving mother’s request of a recently deceased child to share medical supplies she no longer needed.

“The mother called me and said, ‘I have a lot of medical supplies at home, in memory of my children, I want them to go somewhere really special,'” Hannon said.

In Toronto, supplies are kept and sorted at the Roncesvalles Unification Church.

Nationwide, around 7,000 suitcases have left Canada so far, with a total of around £2.5 million in supplies donated.

This program has been in place in some form since 1990, when a couple from St. Catharines, Ont., Dr. Ken Taylor and his wife Denise, began bringing medical supplies to remote areas in Cuba after noticing a shortage of some supplies. When others traveling to Cuba began approaching them to ask if they could help bring in supplies, the organization succeeded.

Since then, the idea of ​​using the holiday to help others has spread.

“We’re all over Canada now,” D’Souza said. “We opened a chapter in California, just opened a chapter in New York.”



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