(A guest post from Seth Amgott, who’s working now in Tanzania.)

As a visitor to Tanzania, I’m taking malaria medication, and I bet President and Mrs. Bush are, too. If you live here, you can’t take the medicine forever, so you get sick, and your children are at risk.

But as an American and a ONE member, I’m loving that we help Tanzanians do something about it. Malaria is basically gone from Zanzibar, an island of 1 million people where it used to be everywhere, and starting to come down on the mainland.

That will happen much faster with President Bush’s announcement today that the U.S. and the Global Fund will distribute 5.2 million vouchers for low-cost nets.

I understood the need when I met Godlove Kiwanga yesterday just after he left church. I asked about malaria – he had it three weeks ago, high fever, serious pain, and lost income for three days. “People with money, they stay home for one week, two weeks. I had to work.” His daughter, Carry, is 3, and she was sick in December for over a week and had to have an IV at the hospital.

Carry sleeps under a mosquito net, but not the good kind. You can get long-last nights near his house in the capital, but they cost about $9 each, a lot in a poor country. “We have net original and net fakes. Fakes are cheap, 2000 shillings (about $1.80). It’s a big difference,” he said.

His next child will probably get an upgrade. Two years ago, the President’s Malaria Initiative started a massive net program for pregnant women and children. First in Zanzibar and quickly spreading, nurses and doctors give out vouchers for nets for pregnant women and children, at a cost that’s now down to 45 cents.

It’s working. I was on Zanzibar Saturday and it’s crazy to think that just two years ago, 9 percent of children on Zanzibar had malaria. Today, after 230,000 nets given out on the island, it’s almost zero! I met the head of the U.S. malaria program, and she told me they tested 750 pregnant women since July - and found none with malaria.

As a member of ONE, I feel really good about it - in 2005, hundreds of thousands of us signed the petition asking the president to do something big for Africa before the G8 summit. One of the things that resulted was the malaria initiative, and now it’s saving the lives of real people.

Tanzanians know it, they’re very warm when they meeting Americans, and President Bush says he’s here to make more Americans know it. Today he went to a school, a clinic, and the Olyset net factory, and I hope Americans see it in the media. Another impact America is having: Everybody here is fascinated by our election. I hope Hillary, McCain or Obama do even more to fight malaria.

Lastly, some ONE band sightings: Barian Shah, who works at the factory President Bush visited, had one on (he found it at a store here). And deputy White House press secretary Tony Fratto, who worked on the malaria initiative, is also wearing his.

-Seth Amgott

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 6:07 pm and is filed under Bush Africa Trip, PMI, Malaria. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.