By Heidi Glaus
St. Louis (KSDK) - There's a bit of an experiment going on at St. Mary's Health Center that doesn't have anything to do with drug dosage or bed side manner. Let's just say it's more a matter of the heart.
Alice Provaznik has been volunteering at St. Mary's for 30 years, and two years ago she decided she needed to do more.
"Well, somebody told me that the nurses on the fifth floor would go home and go to garage sales and buy clothes and take them to some of the girls in need," Provaznik said.
So she started something called Sweet Babies where she collects blankets, bibs, burp clothes, basically anything a baby needs, but this year she asked a younger friend, Jane Tayon for a little help to get the word out.
"And she says well you have to do things on Facebook. She said you do things the 1920s method," Provaznik explained.
"And she said well that will never work," Tayon added.
So a challenge of the old-fashioned way of communicating verses the new began on August 1st.
"I come home from lunch with my friends with a carload of things," Provaznik said.
"She has 80-year-old women trying to find me on Facebook," Tayon said.
It hasn't been a purely clean fight, there's been quite a bit of trash talking.
"But she does the trash talking let's get that straight," Provaznik said.
"Anyone who knows Alice knows she's out for the kill," Tayon added.
In the end, it's the babies and new parents who win, you can see that by all of the thank you notes.
"Oh we get eight or nine a week and I got one from a husband who said he had lost his job and this was his first baby and they couldn't even get excited about it. And he said a social worker came in with a bag and we took everything out of it and we just cried," Provaznik said.
And that's a message that is loud and clear regardless if it was sent snail mail or via Facebook.
KSDK