La Feria del Libro

The Book Fair – ah, how to begin to describe this whole experience.  Every year, Santo Domingo has a big book fair held on the grounds of the Ministry of Culture.   The fair runs 18 days, and around 40 different organizations, including our church, build booths.  Last year, ours had around 38,000 visitors.  “Booth” is really not a correct word.  All of the buildings are at least 12 x 18 or so, but most are much larger, including ours.  They are all constructed in less than three weeks.  Here are some other booths:

The theme this year is “Noche de Hogar” or Family Night.  

Under construction - these booths have electricity, air conditioning, etc.  

Our booth under construction

Our booth, as you can see, has been designed to look like a house.  The fair is open every day from 8 am until 10 pm, with two different shifts of families from the congregations here to welcome folks and share the information. It has been a tremendous amount of work, and we are so happy to have it opened. 

Our finished booth

So in less than two months, we have helped design the structure, helped write the script and supervised the filming of an introductory video, sent out invitations, approved and paid the vendors who built the structure, helped film the process and the daily activities, opened it every morning at 7:30 and then trained the day’s volunteers (about 150 have been involved), ran on errands for more materials, designed a website, designed a Facebook and Twitter pages, prepared gifts for the invited guests at the launching ceremony, prepared a press package for local newspapers and television stations, etc. Whew!  It has been mind-boggling.  We still need to prepare gifts for the volunteers and wrap up information for the planning committee.  Tomorrow is the last day (although we learned today that those in charge of the Fair are considering extending it another week which could bring about my demise!) 

Some of the volunteers who help run the booth

 A picture of the sign-in mural where folks sign that they want to have a family night.  We have used up four murals which are just covered with signatures.

 Inside the booth

On the positive side, we have had over 22,000 visitors and our booth has been featured in several TV broadcasts and print information.  We have also had some fun times meeting people and getting to know the Dominicans better. However, we are going to suggest that we start working on this next year in October and not have so much required and done at the last minute…