Two days after Kenyans defied expectations and peacefully, purposefully approved a new Constitution, I was processing two powerful emotions.

The first one mirrored my overall mindset during the 2008 US Presidential Election, when the chance to participate in an historic event was literally intoxicating. Being able to fly home from my ICFJ Kenya program base to vote only heightened the excitement. I know many Kenyans are feeling that same tidal wave of impact at defying the naysayers through the power of the ballot.

But the other sensation I’m feeling is deep relief.

When my health-journalism fellowship began two and a half years ago, I dreamed about finding the “killer app” for mobile telephones that would revolutionize journalism in Africa.

I didn’t make much headway, and the dream came to look like a wild fantasy. But today, 26-year old Lydia Namubiru is engineering the kind of leap forward I once dreamed would be my claim to fame.

The diminutive Ugandan was working as a features writer for the New Vision newspaper when I arrived in her country at the beginning of 2008.

We are pursuing a great story: More than a hundred teen girls are having fainting spells in a school outside Maputo. The community says ancestors are upset and rituals need to be performed. The Ministry of Health says it is collective hysteria.

A young journalist that I coach is covering this story.  After a press conference at the Ministry of Health, we go for coffee to discuss story angles, ways of asking questions and of taking notes (he takes notes verbatim and slowly, and admires my arrows, bullets and shortcuts, capturing best quotes as they are spoken).

Editors Note: Ghana's Sylvia Vollenhoven attends Knight Foundations/MIT COnference on the Future of News and Civic Media 2010.

My career started on the media timeline with yellow copy paper in triplicate and an Olivetti typewriter. In my son’s book this era followed shortly after the Gutenberg Bible. I am now at a place where the possibilities stretch into infinity and I’m not sure my head can hold it all or that we’re still talking linear progress here.

Editors Note: The blog sums up what I will be expected to do in Malawi as outlined at the week-long orientation session at the ICFJ in Washington DC

My journey to an Africa Development Journalism Fellowship in Malawi started with a significant first step in Washington.

Any reporter who relies on official sources will often miss the real story. That may sound like a cliche, but in countries that don’t have much experience with an independent press, it’s a lesson many reporters are just starting to learn. When they do, however, the results can be stunning.

In 2008, reporter Kakaire A. Kirunda of the Daily Monitor newspaper set out to write a story about the country’s hospital system.

Editors Note: A news story set off a nationwide campaign to contain measles which was killing young children in Zambia. A newly employed reporter came to see me a couple of days after she started working. While waiting for a driver to pick her up after she had finished an assignment, she overheard two nurses talking about an increase in measles in children. They were speculating whether there was an outbreak.

She was unsure about how to get verification for the story.

I stand in front of a sea of eager young faces expecting wisdom. There is a moment of panic when I feel that I don’t know anything worthwhile. But soon passion replaces the panic and I surprise even myself.

_You really made development journalism simple for us. You brought to the fore the need to make people the central characters of our articles. I have written several articles on telecom but most of it focuses on the issues rather than the people affected by those issues. Thanks again.

I am the first person in my family and among my friends to go to university. My parents are not schooled. They are peasants. They can’t speak Portuguese, they speak makuhwa. My father, though, was a cheke, a mwalima, learned in the Koran and respected in the village. We lived in Metarica, in Niassa province, in Mozambique s farthest north.

On Thursday afternoon, when Savana hits the streets, a copy is posted outside the newsroom for passersby to read for free. Who knows if it will inspire some to become journalists?

We are 11 siblings and I am the seventh, born in 1983. The eldest went to high school and became a border policeman. My other brothers work on the land. My sisters got married early. Two siblings died of disease.