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Jim Cashel, GAIA’s new Board Chair, just returned from his visit to GAIA’s programs in Malawi along with Executive Director Todd Schafer and fellow Board Member Phil Darrow. He shares a particularly meaningful reflection from his trip below.

Earlier this month, while visiting one of GAIA's clinics in a remote corner of Malawi, I witnessed a miracle.

The clinic was like so many others I had visited: a throng of women, many with children, waiting patiently to be seen by the clinical officer. A nurse weighing anxious toddlers. A pharmacist dispensing medicines. A staffperson leading a health education discussion.

But away from the clinic, under a large tree, where a team from the government was dispensing childhood vaccines to a cluster of women and their infants, I saw something I had never seen and thought I would never see: children receiving a brand-new vaccine for malaria.

To the moms, this was just another childhood immunization. To the kids, it was another unwelcome stab from a stranger. But to me, this was a miracle, for I knew that this vaccine had required 60 years of research, development, and testing. It traversed countless setbacks. It required billions of dollars of investment. And here, finally, it is.

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But come to think of it, many of the other tests and medicines and vaccines on offer today - HIV test kits, antiretroviral therapy, antibiotics, birth control - also represent decades of research and billions of dollars of investment. But we quickly take them for granted, much as we'll soon also take the malaria vaccine for granted.

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So perhaps the bigger miracle isn't the existence of a new vaccine. It's that it, and so many other medical breakthroughs, can actually reach patients who otherwise would have no access to healthcare at all. For that to happen, it requires decades of effort, and billions of dollars of investment -- and for GAIA to reach the end of the road. It's a miracle.

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