David Benjamin Coffey

His monotone speech and expressionless face as we rode back to what would be, for us, the first stop of our journey back to Taipei and a hot shower, joined the faces of the hundreds I had filmed as they fled villages cut off from the outside world. Those who waited for any sign of relatives who hadn’t been heard from in days, or stood where a father’s or daughter’s house used to be and wept, burning incense and crying out for the soul’s spirit to make the journey back to earth and to be at rest.

My camera was shoved away, rained on, glared at, and pushed under a bridge to film a body being winched up from the mud. The AP team in Taiwan – a photojournalist, videographer, and print reporter – moved constantly forward, following leads from Buddhist monks housing refugees, hitchhiking into destroyed areas with supply trucks and 4 x 4’s, and debating the hazards of a homemade cable pulley over a raging river.

At the end of the week, riding back on that truck with the young man who had lost every aspect of home he had ever known, I struggled to find a reason for being there, a reason beyond the news medias’ fascination with death, and humanity’s morbid curiosity.

I found it in the local media’s pressure on the government, criticizing its slow rescue response and President Ma Ying-jeou’s remarks that the villagers should have left earlier, implying they were to blame for the tragedy.  Showing the emotional state of survivors and relatives of survivors added a force to their criticism that would have lacked impact on viewers otherwise.

I found another reason the next week, reviewing footage of rescue efforts and seeing the Taiwanese story of communal strength and ingenuity emerge from the pain and loss caused by the disaster.  I saw the beauty in the tears of a man praying with a Taoist priest for his brother’s soul to be at peace, and I realized that we reporters capture poetry as much as history.  Reporting on a tragedy requires a commitment to the sometimes invasive methods of capturing the emotional and physical toll of a disaster on people, not only its effect on government policy and economics.

Stepping off the plane last July to begin working for the Associated Press in Bangkok, my expectations high and my lungs adjusting to heavy humid air, I embarked on an experience that has taught me how reporters and videographers work in international bureaus as part of a larger machine headquartered elsewhere.

Working for the Associated Press Television Network in Bangkok, I saw and helped send on news footage being sent to the Bangkok server from across Southeast Asia, and heard first-hand accounts of reporters returning from Afghanistan, Cambodia, and Laos.

I learned the process of covering an event for a wire service, with the obligatory rush back to the bureau on a motorbike to cut through traffic, and editing and sending the footage to the London APTN headquarters in an effort to beat the other international wire services.

Interviews with political activists at rallies and in coffee shops, and doorstep questions while filming an Australian leaving a Bangkok sentencing hearing rounded out experience shooting press conferences. In August the Australian Andrew Hood was convicted of attempting to smuggle drugs out of Thailand and his swollen and resigned eyes told the whole story as he walked away from receiving not the expected 10-20 year sentence, but a lifetime term in prison.

Quiet weeks in Bangkok are spent researching and starting work on longer-term projects that inevitably fall into the background as the next big event takes precedence.

My most recent effort chasing alligator-sized lizards in a public park in Bangkok for hours paid off with two minutes of footage to add to nightly news programs around the world.

Throughout my time in Thailand so far, I’ve been fortunate enough to work beside some of the best journalists in the world, and have had the opportunity to improve my shooting and editing skills in real-world situations, covering events from start to finish and transmitting stories from the field.

At the beginning of August, I filmed a screaming contest in Thailand and left two weeks later to document nature’s unpredictability in Taiwan. And now, with a month left before this internship officially ends, I am chasing stories as fast as I can, keeping my shoes muddy and my lens clean.