Editors Note: Repairing tiny faulty hearts in Maputo - what's Tina Turner got to do with it?In our busy interconnected lives, the only spaces where we are off-line and off-cellphone may be the shower and the airplane. Showers one mostly takes alone. Planes are a collective space but we, mass travel sufferers and on-line junkies, act as if they weren’t.

We shut down and hunker into our individual bubble without even a hello to the next passenger. We use flight time to read, work, doze, or just be, as Greta Garbo would say: Ah-lone.

It is understandable.

The deaths of two editors sadden colleagues and send a message. Two of my colleagues at the Zambia Daily Mail died on Christmas day, casting, as the newspaper's story the next day said, a dark cloud over us. Both died after illnesses, that were not described in the story.

Mr. Pelekelo Liswaniso the newspaper's production editor was 50 years old. Ms. Diana Zulu, sports editor was 39.

Both had been amongst us long enough and recently enough for their loss to be jarring as well as very, very sad.

Editors Note: New information technologies used during presidential election in Mozambique.Mozambique held presidential elections at the end of October, with the final results announced in mid-November. You couldn’t ignore the campaign buzz in the weeks leading to the polls: horn-honking caravans, city walls covered in colourful posters, supporters wearing T-shirts, caps and kapulanas (African cloth) emblazoned with party colours and logos.

LUSAKA, ZAMBIA — Reporters have a choice on World AIDS Day. They can go to the press conferences, the speeches, the red-ribbon-test-a-thons that happen every year, and write down what everyone said -- again.

LUSAKA, ZAMBIA — For three days this week, a group of artists, researchers, journalists and others ready to make a difference sat around the Olive Grove room at the Intercontinental Hotel and talked about what they had in common.

Not much, one would think, on the face of it. Researchers talked about protocols and policies, journalists about tight deadlines and bad headlines, and the artists -- singers, dramatists, visual artists -- they talked about the myriad ways to create messages concerning matters of life and death.

Fuel shortages, power failures and Internet outages hinder, but don't halt health reporting here.Last night the lights went out, the sudden total onset of darkness followed by a resounding crash of thunder that went on, rumbling and clattering, shaking other bits of infrastructure for some minutes after.

Interpreting sounds in the darkness can lead to dire conclusions, and it seemed likely then that the power would stay out for some time, as it has in the past after routinely predictable events.

Maputo was getting on my nerves big time. I was running out of cash. My credit card was not working. Opening a bank account was taking longer than expected. I had a bad cold. Every morning at 5:00, the peacocks of the presidential palace, 30 metres from my window, woke me up with their screeching.

When I packed for Maputo, it was 32 degrees in Pretoria, 500 kms away. Friends in Maputo said it was equally hot there, so I packed dresses. But the weather in Maputo is treacherous. Two days later a nippy wind blew from the Indian Ocean.

I didn't think anyone would be watching when I agreed to talk about health reporting early on a Saturday morning talk show. But they were. Good Morning Zambia

MACHA, ZAMBIA — Chief Macha, of the Tonga people, has enough concerns of his own. The road that runs through his chiefdom and connects it to the nearest small town is rutted, rock-strewn, and when travelled by more than one vehicle at a time, enveloped in blinding clouds of dust. In this remote rural stretch malaria has been endemic, until recently killing about 50 children a year in a population of about 180,000 people.

A trip to Ndola in Zambia's Copper Belt showed that journalists -- and their best opportunities -- share common ground on either side of the AtlanticNdola, Zambia — I have wanted to come to this Copper Belt city since I arrived in Zambia, as I have seen it as the place behind the events that move this nation. That is probably an overstatement, as in reality the far-flung villages, the border towns, the tourist attractions, and certainly Lusaka, the capital, all shape events here.