
G4G’s U.S. staff landed in Lilongwe, Malawi this past Monday to work side by side with our Malawi staff. Since we can’t be in-country nearly as much as we’d like, we have a lot of ground to cover during our one-month stay. We’ll be visiting all of our program partners to assess their progress, evaluate our programs and conduct surveys to see how we can best work together to serve the children in their care.
The first partner we visited was Bright Vision, an organization providing services to hundreds of toddlers, students, elderly community members and people living with HIV/AIDS in the surrounding villages. While at Bright Vision, we visited four different “nursery-school” centers–although they can hardly be called such by American standards. While community members had come together and volunteered their time to provide day-care services for the children, there was no actual “center” for the daycare to be held, no educational materials or toys for the children to play with and certainly no compensation for any of the workers.
At the third center, we noticed a huge pile of bricks sitting unused in a near-by field. We asked Stanley, the Director of Bright Vision, what the story was. He told us that the community had molded hundreds of bricks from mud (hundreds of hours of labor) to build a nursery school center for the children, yet they could not afford the cement to erect the structure. It was this lack of access to basic material inputs that was keeping Bright Vision from advancing their programs.
Despite the material shortcomings of the organization, I was so impressed with Bright Vision’s motivation, initiative and resourcefulness with the few materials that they did have. Every notebook, pen, stapler, and pair of shoes provided to Bright Vision by Goods for Good was being utilized to its fullest.
At the end of our stay- we sat down with local leaders, executive committee members and volunteers to discuss their needs and future plans for the organization how Goods for Good can best assist them in achieving their goals.
To support an organization like Bright Vision, click here. A little bit goes a long way.












