Cross posted at The Smoking Room
It had all the makings of a great movie – a young graduate travels to Namibia on a journalism internship, hoping to reconnect with her father in his native land. She anchors the evening news several times and retraces the exile of the country’s first president through the countryside – where, unlike the city, malaria-infected mosquitos are plentiful. The nets don’t keep them all out, and she dies weeks later attending a journalism convention in Atlanta. I knew a guy in college who traveled to Africa more than once on missions and got malaria twice, but he was well-prepared and treated right away. It’s hard to fathom how someone in the West could contract the disease and die so shortly. She didn’t have health insurance, and the U.S. Embassy, apparently not knowing her itinerary, told her malaria wasn’t a risk in the area where she’d do her internship. The first hospital she tried in America released her with no diagnosis.
Akilah Amapindi was 23. What a sad story.
I’m a tech journalist who’s making a TV show about a college newspaper.