Friday, May 26, 2006
Why Malaria? Why Africa? Why Tanzania? Why Now?
By Bryan Monroe, NABJ President
Imagine: You are sitting in the newsroom and CNN flashes that a Boeing 747 jumbo jet filled with young children has just crashed, less than a mile away.
What would you do?
Grab your gear and rush out to the scene? Quickly update the Web site? Tear up the front page?
Now imagine that that same event happened every day of every month of every year, for years and years on end. And not just one plane filled with children but as many as four 747s crashing each day. A child dying every 30 seconds. An important news story? We thought so, too. Which is why I recently led a delegation of NABJ members to Africa.
The toll is enormous. Nearly a million people around the world— most of them children, most of them in Africa — die of malaria each year. Yes, malaria. A disease long since wiped out in America and in much of the western world continues to take young lives, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa.
On its own, this should be a significant news story, demanding coverage by every major news outlet across the globe. Just looking at the numbers, news directors and editors should be rushing reporters and photographers to the continent of Africa, chartering the next flight to Nairobi or Kigali or Accra or Dar es Salaam to cover this widespread tragedy.
But, of course, we know they’re not doing that.
In the noise and chaos of everyday life, we’re all simply overwhelmed with our own daily problems: escalating gas prices, immigration reform, declining public schools, obesity and social security and global warming. And of course, Barry Bonds and missing blonde women.
Most of us are far too busy, too focused on very real problems too close to home to worry about children dying half way across the globe. Until, of course, it affects one of our own.
That described me and many journalists in America less than a year ago. Other than the occasional mention in an obscure National Geographic article, or a passing reference on the Discovery Channel, I and many of my colleagues had no clue about the phenomenal impact malaria has on Africa, particularly in the region south of the Saharan desert.
That ignorance ended on the morning of August 8, 2005.
On the last day of the NABJ 30th Anniversary Convention & Career Fair in Atlanta last summer, just hours before the annual NABJ Gospel Brunch was to begin, the phone rang, waking me up. It was Bob Butler, president of the Bay Area Black Journalists Association and one of the mentors on the NABJ student radio project.One of his students, a bright, energetic young woman from Staten Island, New York named Akilah Amapindi, had been in and out of the hospital all week in Atlanta. Doctors were trying to figure out why she was so tired, lethargic and suffering from severe flu-like symptoms.
Turned out, Akilah, who had just returned from an internship in Africa working for Namibian Broadcasting and helping with a documentary project in Mozambique, had malaria.
They thought they could treat it there in the hospital, just miles away from the prestigious Centers for Disease Control. (Ironically, the CDC, based in Atlanta, was founded 60 years ago to eradicate malaria in America.)
But early that Sunday morning, while the rest of NABJ was preparing to give thanks for another successful convention, Akilah Amapindi died in her sleep. She was 23.
Malaria? In America? That just couldn’t be.
It had virtually disappeared from the U.S. landscape more than three decades ago, wiped out by a combination of DDT spraying, the urbanization of cities and, of all things, air conditioning (turns out that as more Americans stayed cool inside with the windows shut, the malaria-carrying mosquitoes had less opportunity to bite).
Why are Americans still dying of a disease that many of us thought was dead itself? Little did we know that, in fact, most deaths of malaria in the U.S. come from those who have traveled abroad and were bitten by mosquitoes, likely in Africa.
That’s why in October of last year, NABJ Treasurer John Yearwood and longtime NABJ associate member Djibril Diallo, the co-chairman of our World Affairs Task Force and now a key voice within the leadership of the United Nations, came up with the idea to organize a fact-finding trip to East Africa to focus our journalistic skills squarely on the crisis of malaria and other Africa health issues.
We have long thought it important to provide opportunities for our members to travel abroad and cover international stories, stories that many would otherwise not have a chance to cover, given tightening travel budgets in newsrooms and limited opportunities for our journalists.
But this time, it was personal. One of our own had lost her life, and we needed to learn more about why and how it happened.
So, a group of ten NABJ members from newspapers and television, radio and online were assembled and spent ten days in early May traveling to Tanzania in eastern Africa to learn about and write about the malaria crisis sweeping the continent. We were able to receive funding for the trip from the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and Sumitomo Chemical, makers of special bed nets impregnated with insecticide to protect villagers from mosquitoes at night.
Joining me in the delegation were: Yearwood, who is also world editor at The Miami Herald; Diallo; Butler, who is also director of diversity for CBS Radio & TV; Damaso Reyes, reporter/photographer, New York Amsterdam News; Ervin Dyer, reporter, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Deborah Douglas, deputy features editor, Chicago Sun Times; Keith Hadley, photographer, Atlanta Journal Constitution; Syandene Rhodes-Pitts, reporter/anchor, WMC-TV in Memphis; Cherie Berkley, assistant managing editor WebMD Health, and Stephanie Arnold, writer, Philadelphia Inquirer. Five European journalists met up with us in Dar es Salaam, and traveled with us during the week.
After being briefed by malaria experts in New York City, we flew 21 hours to Dar es Salaam to meet with government officials and local journalists. We also learned how Tanzania and other countries are using the popularity of soccer and other sports to spotlight the campaign against malaria.
We documented the week-long trip with a first-ever NABJ blog filled with day-by-day accounts, photos, audio reports, video clips and a multimedia slide show. Check it out and let me know what you think.
Through the World Affairs Task Force, we will be planning additional trips to Africa — while in Tanzania, we were invited to Zimbabwe by their Tanzanian ambassador there to look at press freedom issues that have been plaguing the fledgling nation — as well as fellowships to Brazil and elsewhere, covering issues of interest to blacks in America and worldwide, stories that need to be told by NABJ storytellers. All fellowships will be open to NABJ members to apply.
But we will never forget what we learned in Tanzania, about malaria, about Africa and about life. There are stories still to be told and lives still to be saved.
And we will never forget Akilah.
To help NABJ create more opportunities for international fellowships, you can donate to the NABJ Freedom Fund, click here. To help prevent malaria and save lives in Africa, you can donate to the Global Fund here.
Keith Hadley/Atlanta Journal-Constitution
NABJ President Bryan Monroe presents orphans in the Jambiani village of Zanzibar with long-lasting bed nets to protect them against malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
