Africans like to say that Africa is not for sissies. It is, however, tailor-made for an intrepid young journalist such as Katie Lewis.

 

Lewis doesn’t fit the stereotypical image of the khaki-clad, rugged foreign correspondent reporting the terrors of war in a gravelly voice. But last year the Canadian journalism graduate braved a different yet equally frightening battlefield in the world’s worst malaria zone: Apac province, northern Uganda. As if the disease load were not enough, the region was also ravaged by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), the rebel group now in peace talks aimed at ending the 20-year insurgency.

 

In 2005, just as she was moving from the undergraduate to the Master’s journalism program at Ottawa’s Carleton University, Lewis heard about the IDRC awards for journalists. She was determined to win one so she could travel and report for both radio and print, her two media loves. She was also determined to take the road less traveled, whatever the dangers it posed.

 

“In my IDRC application I didn’t want to propose stories everyone else was already doing such as Afghanistan or AIDS in Africa,” said Lewis, now 25 and a reporter with the Toronto Star. “I like writing about health because it’s very real and touches people’s everyday lives.”

 

In researching a topic for her IDRC application, Lewis discovered some facts that shocked her. Malaria was eradicated in much of the developed world in the 1960s through DDT spraying, but the pesticide subsequently became environmentally unacceptable. Foreign funding for spray programs in developing countries also dried up. Malaria now threatens half the world’s population, with 90 percent of all cases in sub-Saharan Africa. The global death toll is expected to double in the next 20 years if radical action is not taken.

 

Uganda is particularly hard-hit: the country’s Ministry of Health reports that 116 000 people die of the disease annually, compared with 80 000 AIDS deaths. Lewis zeroed in on Uganda’s Apac province, the epicentre of global malaria. Here, a person is bitten by malarial mosquitoes an astonishing 1 500 times per year on average, the highest level ever recorded. By comparison, residents of Uganda’s more temperate capital, Kampala, suffer an average seven malarial bites per year.

 

Lewis won an IDRC award to produce a radio documentary on the pros and cons of the proposed use of DDT in Uganda to reduce mosquito infestations. She visited the East African country for several months in 2006.

 

“The best part was meeting people in the villages and the doctors and nurses in the clinics,” says Lewis. “I was lucky. In Uganda, radio rules because it’s cheaper than buying newspapers, so people were very interested in taking part in my documentary. Plus Ugandans are amazingly friendly; they invite you into their homes. They were easy to interview.”

 

Lewis is now putting the finishing touches to her documentary, which will allow her to meet the final credit requirement for her Master’s degree. She is currently negotiating with a number of North American radio networks interested in airing the documentary in 2008. The Uganda Radio Network, a national news agency, and the Ottawa Citizen have also carried Lewis’ Uganda stories.

 

With all of Africa’s ongoing tragedies, why focus on malaria? “Malaria has terrible, wide-ranging impacts on people’s lives,” says Lewis. Repeated bouts of malaria are believed to be one of the biggest reasons why Africans cannot break out of the poverty cycle. People fall sick with the disease three to four times a year.

 

Lewis feels that if Canadians care about Africa, they have to care about malaria. “I can’t help but compare it to the global effort to fight AIDS. If every Canadian spent a dollar or two per year to fight malaria, it wouldn’t be an issue much longer.”

 

Lewis also took an in-depth look at other aspects of the malaria issue, such as the difficulties in promoting bed nets, counterfeit and ineffective anti-malarial drugs, and village-level ignorance about the disease. “It is commonly believed that malaria is caused by eating mangoes or being lazy,” she says.

 

While in East Africa, Lewis collaborated with the Uganda Radio Network. The network produces feature stories, which local Ugandan radio stations can download and broadcast at little cost.

 

“Most of the guys on the network were doing political stories which were about Kampala, the capital, not about things affecting everyday life in the villages. Nobody was covering health. The other reporters called me ‘Miss Malaria’. I think they were surprised to see how many of my malaria stories were being picked up by the local stations.”

 

Amazingly, Lewis herself did not get malaria in Uganda. She took malarial prophylaxis and was scrupulous in using a pesticide-impregnated bed net. She makes light of contracting bilharzia (a parasitic disease), salmonella, and dysentery, and had a bad spill from her motor scooter, one of the more terrifying ways of traveling in Uganda.

 

In truth, nothing frightened her as much as doing the “night walk” with northern Ugandan children who, to escape the LRA’s midnight raids on their villages, walked under cover of darkness to the city of Gulu to find a bed each evening. “Some walked 20 kilometres every night. Many were just eight or 10 years old, and had been in and escaped from the LRA already.”

 

Lewis says that thanks to the IDRC award, she gained the Diane King Stuemer Fellowship, which included a stint at the Ottawa Citizen and another trip to Uganda. Together, these experiences earned her a job at the Toronto Star. But Lewis only really wanted to go back to Africa, so she traded Toronto for Kampala in late 2007 to work there as a freelance journalist.

 

 

Katie Lewis’s blog: http://katielewis.ca/