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).

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.

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.

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.

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.