President Bush visis TFFT during his Tanzania Trek
A day after arriving in Tanzania's largest city Dar es Salaam, President Bush and the First Lady made their way to TFFT's home base of Arusha. After a morning visit to a hospital in our former village of Patandi, they made an appearance at the Emusoi Center for Pastoralists' Girls, a home for Maasai girls either preparing to enter or already enrolled in secondary school. Agness Isaya, one of the children TFFT placed in Usa River Academy last January, came from Emusoi. Thus explains why both Managing Director Hunter Flint and Program Director Bayless Parsley scored an invite to the event.

Bush's six-day, five-country Africa visit made headlines across the globe. But it was in Tanzania that he seemed to receive his warmest welcome. Throngs of people came out to catch just a short glimpse of the American leader's motorcade as it traveled alone down the normally chaotic Nairobi-Moshi Rd. Flowers were thrown, American flags were waived, and that classic Tanzanian hospitality came out in full force. For a president so often beleaguered by problems in the Middle East, it was a refreshing change of pace, this focus on the positive attributes of his administration.

Take the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) Compact with Tanzania as an example. Signed by President Bush and Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete the day before the Arusha visit, this accord is slated to provide the country with almost $700 million over the next five years -- money that is meant to improve the country's transportation network, secure reliable supplies of energy and expand access to clean and safe water.

"Vindication comes when you save lives," Bush said while shaking hands with a South African woman within earshot of the TFFT employees present at Emusoi that day. When viewed through the prism of his Africa policy, the president's words are hard to deny. Under this administration, the number of Africans receiving anti-retrovirals to fight HIV/AIDS has skyrocketed from 50,000 to more than 1.2 million. The fight against malaria, a less publicized yet more urgent issue, has also been aided by contributions made by Bush during his time in office. Kikwete cited health statistics from Zanzibar, a small island off the coast of mainland Tanzania, which prove that progress is possible: in 2004, 500,000 malaria cases were recorded; by 2007, that figure had dropped to just 10,000.

Bush's donation of more than five million mosquito nets, enough for every Tanzanian child under the age of five, should help transfer these kinds of results to the rest of Kikwete's people.