“3. any condition or place of temporary punishment, suffering, expiation, or the like.
–adjective
4. serving to cleanse, purify, or expiate.”

 I’ve heard of one retail cell phone repair man in the ten years I’ve been using cell phones, and his profession made him newsworthy: I first heard of him on the local TV news broadcast. What do you do with the old cell phone when you have upgraded? Is it sitting in cell phone purgatory? Or have you donated it to a battered women’s shelter or other victim assistance program?

Most of us have heard this could be done almost from the beginning: Any charged cell phone must be connected to the emergency number of the local police, therefore can be used by victims without cost. But millions of unused cell phones languish in odd corners of our homes.

A Stanford student was volunteering in an African hospital when he personally set up a telephone network with a refurbished laptop and refurbished cell phones. My brother-in-law in Rome, who works for the World Health Organization, let me know about this new-found way to donate cell phones, even though Stanford is where my husband is employed! Small world, huh? The hospital saved a thousand hours of medical worker travel time and thousands of dollars in fuel after paying the cost of minutes (about $500) in the six months he was there. The saved monies were subsequently allocated for the purchase of medications.

When this visionary student returned to school, he set up the foundation HopePhones.org to collect old cell phones for additional communities. The way it works is this:

Pull your old phones out of those badly-needed storage spaces. Go to HopePhones.org , print out a postage-paid envelope. Place your well-packaged phone in the envelope. Unfortunately, they have no need for those accessories:  we need to find a different way to recycle them.

HopePhones then sends batches of phones to a recycler, and are paid a certain value for each phone. The resulting money is then used to purchase refurbished cell phones, which are distributed to widely spread medical personnel in developing countries. A text message can keep a medical worker from physically driving to a locality only to find no patients; it can bring a medical worker to an acute case. The resulting savings can be used by the medical center to buy needed equipment, medications, or salary hours.

You have magically cleansed another cell phone of a portion of its carbon footprint! Now I know what to do with my phone when I trade it in for an iphone or Blackberry. Even better, you can follow the progress of HopePhones on Twitter and Facebook!