The seventh of July (Saba Saba) is a holiday in Tanzania, and they hold a large trade fair the week of and prior to the holiday, culminating with a day off on the seventh. I visited the fair with my supervisor here on Tuesday.
I wasn’t sure exactly what I was expecting – she had told me that the Ministry of Health had a booth there (and the City Council had provided posters on malaria prevalence), and that there were various vendors selling crafts. What we found was a large area full of booths and exhibits from all sorts of industries, including forestry, leather workers, food and cashew vendors, the military, etc. The panda rug Jeremy had bought last year was still there, and there was even a mini-zoo, with a giraffe, lion, leopards, hyenas, wildebeasts, and various other animals not-so-common in American zoos. An ex-president of Tanzania was visiting the same day as us, and a large procession marched around him as he visited the booths.
It was also cool to see the Ministry of Health section: PSI and various other public health organizations had set up booths of information (some in Swahili, some in English). There was a good amount of focus put on malaria: there was lots of information on it, including microscopes containing the malaria parasite to view, and they even had rapid diagnostic malaria tests set up for people to use.
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