With support from the BU College of Communication, I spent a week in Uganda reporting for MedTech Boston, the news outlet where I interned over the summer. My assignment brought me to the southwestern city of Mbarara to cover a medtech hackathon organized by Massachusetts General Hospital’s Consortium for Affordable Medical Technology (CAMTech). This year’s event was held Aug. 25-27 at the Mbarara University of Science and Technology. The focus was neonatal and maternal health.

After covering MIT Hacking Medicine’s annual hackathon, I was eager to see this type of event play out in Uganda. I was also excited to report in East Africa (I’d been to the region three times before, but never as a journalist). My trip to Uganda was challenging and rewarding in new ways. Here are some insights I gained:

  • Learn from local journalists. I hadn’t reported on anything in Uganda before the hackathon. My Ugandan colleagues helped me understand the social, economic and political developments surrounding the hackathon, including the government’s broader push to grow Uganda’s innovation economy and startup ecosystem. They also shared stories from their extensive reporting experience. One had reported from Iraq, South Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo. Another had worked for years as a health/science reporter and had also been a fixer for American journalists.
  • Keep your devices charged. Each day of the hackathon, I had just a few hours to write my article each night. I’d stay up until 1 or 2 am working in my hotel room. But I forgot to charge my devices throughout the day. On Saturday night, there was a power outage (not uncommon in East Africa) and the generator wasn’t turning on. With 36 percent battery, I scrambled to file my report before my computer died.
  • Question the cliché narratives. On Friday, I visited a local maternity ward with a team of Ugandan entrepreneurs. Mothers lay on cots under rolled-up mosquito nets. Puddles of liquid seeped on the floor. The power went out for about forty minutes. I didn’t have time to report extensively on this, but I wondered how I would have covered it. It would have been easy to paint a bleak, despairing picture focused on the poverty. But I kept thinking about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk on the danger of a single story. The hospital was still operational, even if it lacked resources. The mothers in the room had survived, in a country with a maternal mortality rate of 343 deaths per 1,000 live births. The entrepreneurs had come to evaluate the hospital and innovate localized solutions. It made me realize that Western media outlets need to look beyond the cliché Africa rising/Africa falling narratives. The reality is more nuanced than that.
  • Don’t plan too far ahead. This one is difficult for me, because I love planning, scheduling and to-do lists. But I’ve found that you can only plan so far ahead when traveling, especially in a cash economy and word-of-mouth environment. I had to change my hotel booking at the last-minute. I planned to take a coaster from Kampala to Jinja but ended up taking a matatu instead. I stumbled upon a source when he drove by on a dirt road. It’s important to be flexible.
  • Don’t forget your raincoat when the rains are coming. My trip came at the end of Southern Uganda’s dry season. But I still managed to get caught in a downpour. It reminded me of the rains in Tanzania: when it rains, it torrents. This one lasted for an hour. Bring a jacket!

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If you want to learn about the event, you can read the reports here. If you have questions, comments, stories from your own reporting in Africa, feel free to reach me: apollard@bu.edu.