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).

Panamá -- La Gran Alianza Nacional por la Seguridad Ciudadana, una organización que agrupa a decenas de grupos sociales, empresariales, y de derechos civiles, decidió unirse al proyecto de Mi Panamá Transparente, un sitio de Internet que está dirigido por periodistas panameños y que registra incidentes de crimen y corrupción reportados por los ciudadanos en un mapa digital.

La Alianza adoptó al proyecto como su vía de recoger las denuncias sobre inseguridad y corrupción.

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.

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.