Last year, the aluminum production company Mozal quietly requested authorization to operate with direct emissions (or bypass the filtering system) while repairing its Fume Treatment Centers (FTC) for six months, at a cost of $10-million. "Sub-optimal engineering in the centers," was the bland term used by Mozal assets president Mike Fraser to explain the need for repairs. Translation: shoddy quality.

The smelter, one of the largest foreign investments ever in Mozambique, is visible from the highway linking Maputo to South Africa.

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).

The difference in Port-au-Prince and Washington DC is just a microcosm of what can, and needs, to be done in Haiti's post earthquake reconstruction. There is no comparison, really, between navigating Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, and the orderly, manicured streets of DC.

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.

Editors Note: You don't have to go very far to find health stories in Maputo...just listen in the newsroom.

The health page was laid out late last week. I had a headache so I went home around 7 pm to lie down. Around 9:30 the editor called: our turn for layout. I hopped on a taxi and dashed to Savana, It was unbearably hot and humid. The newsroom is in the basement of an old house. The sub was sitting on the steps to the garden.

Editors Note: Six hours of non-stop rain bring city to standstill in Mozambique.

It started with a tap-tap-tap on the window around 3 AM. Half asleep, I thanked the rain as a blessing, a respite from the scorching heat we’ve been having in Maputo, up to 38 Celsius.

The tap-tap-tap became a steady, non-stop, six-hour-long downpour. By 8 am, chunks of the city were cut off. People could not go to work.  In the Baixa, the financial centre downtown, by the bay, people were swimming with water at chest level. Muddy water flooded into banks and shops. Traffic stopped. Schools closed.

An award from the Minister of Health is just one prize for Daily Mail's malaria reporting, as journalists see rates of the disease drop.