Editors Note: Zarina Geloo travels to leper colony in Zambia.

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.

Editors Note: Zarina Geloo returns to the Times of Zambia sixteen years later.

Everything seems to have changed since I was last the Times of Zambia, it was a little unnerving, but I realised very quickly that actually, things are still the same.

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.

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.

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.

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.