My Nonprofit Reviews

I could talk about the great work that APOPO has done, clearing thousands of acres from landmines and saving countless lives, but you can read about that on their website.

My story is a little bit more personal. I am not a "high value" donor--just £9/month and sometimes it bounces. I don't actually care much about land mines or tuberculosis.

I interact with APOPO through their Facebook and Instagram pages. That's how I discovered them--my feeds are mostly about rats, so Meta served up an ad about rats.

I keep domestic rats (rattus norvegius)(sp?) and I consistently hear comments like "eww don't invite me over, I'll bring poison" or "oh nice my snake is hungry" or just the good old fashioned "kill it!"

But the more well known APOPO becomes, the more I get comments like "oh, rats can sniff out landmines, right?" or "oh they use rats for testing for TB, right?"

So my support for APOPO is purely selfish. Nonetheless, they respond to me on Facebook, personally. When I asked if the rats eat meat, they answered me and told me that they eat fish sometimes. So I asked if the fish could make an appearance at Full Cheek Friday, and the very next Friday there were dried fishes amongst the fruits.

I asked if we could have a Facebook group for those of us who adopted HeroRats. The group is quiet, but it exists.

Each time I ask a question, APOPO responds to me as if I am the most important diamond value donor. I feel like they genuinely care about me and are friends.

I said before that I don't actually care about landmines or TB. The thing is, though, because I feel like APOPO is a group of my friends who care about me, I can't help but care about their work - the things that matter to my friends also matter to me.

All that and I'm only a cheap donor who can barely afford to help... I'm not special. I'm not getting special treatment. So I can only assume that they treat all of their donors like this. And an organisation that cares that much about us, not just the corporate level mega donors, is really rare.