In 2010 Mission Travel launched it's inaugural Giving Back campaign where we gave away $100,000 in grants to various recipients.

One of the winners was Geoffrey* (*name changed to protect his identity) who won $5,000 to supply diesel generators enabling remote villages to receive electricity for the first time. The name of the country and area has also been suppressed to protect the work done here.

Here is an update on what the response was like:

Generators were purchased in the capital city of the country we work in. We spent 18 days over the next 6 weeks in two remote villages putting a light in every room and one outside every ‘house’, as well as one power point for each house so that they could charge their mobile phone batteries.  There wasn’t enough wire in our town to complete the projects, so we had to buy 1.5 km of wire and fly it over from the capital city. 

The cheers that arose when the lights went on in the first village was very uplifting.  There was a bit of a hiccup at first, because when the generator was started the light in the generator room did not work (it turned out later that the globe was no good!), and I didn’t look outside to see if any other lights were on, so we turned the generator off, and checked its electrical panel – no obvious problem.  Then people started telling us that there had been light on in one house.  So we started the generator again and yes, there was light in one house.  I then switched on the circuits to the other houses and as each group of houses lit up, there were cheers  and young girls dancing in the light!! 

Solomon’s house did not have 2 lights operating, so we did a quick check and found that we had not connected one wire, so after correcting that, we got another round of cheers! Solomon’s house was very important as his family hosted us throughout the whole 13 days we were in his village, and several men had gathered there to eat the celebratory meal (rice and boiled goat) with us.

 This project was made possible by Mission Travel’s generous Giving Back program – 150 people’s lives have been changed forever.

Pictured below: From a feeble kerosene lamp to light!