Alums cover tsunami aftermath

photo by Jerry Redfern/OnAsia Images

A group of Israelis takes a break from searching for their friends in the rubble of a resort.

By Jim Beyer
J-School Web reporter

Three University of Montana School of Journalism graduates who have reported on the recent tsunami in southern Asia say the effect on both land and people is almost beyond belief.

"The waves pulverized anything in their paths, turning high-end resorts into refuse piles,” writes Karen Coates, a 1993 graduate of the print program. “Everything is where it shouldn't be: doors and windows littering the ground, an overturned truck in a hotel lobby, electric wires in ditches, concrete posts snapped in half, a tree sprouting from a windshield."

Coates and her husband, photographer Jerry Redfern, also a 1993 grad, live in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and make their living as freelancers. After spending a month in Sri Lanka, they returned to Thailand just three days before the tsunamis hit on Dec. 26. Coates and Redfern rushed to Khao Lak Beach near Phuket to report on the disaster.

Rescuers dug through that wreckage for bodies, Coates reported. The ones they found were taken to a local temple to join perhaps 1,200 other unidentified corpses. The bloated and rotting corpses lay on the temple's grounds, where Thai authorities sprayed them with disinfectant and kept them cool with dry ice. A week after the disaster, thousands of refrigerated containers arrived to store the bodies until they are identified through DNA tests, a process that could take months. Some cadavers may never be matched to a name.

Nybo

Thomas Nybo, a 1995 Journalism School graduate, witnessed the tsunami’s aftermath from the Maldives Islands, where he went to report for UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund.

“Nobody lives on this once-postcard-perfect island anymore,” he wrote in his latest dispatch. The island of Gemendhoo “resembles a war zone where a thousand bombs exploded, leaving no structure untouched.” But even though the island was swept clean by the huge wave, only seven of the 460 inhabitants were lost.

Formerly a CNN reporter, Nybo covered the invasion of Iraq and was embedded with the Italian 173rd Airborne Brigade. He was also at work in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.

Nybo joined UNICEF in May 2004. A Helena native, he returned to University of Montana in November to lecture at senior seminar classes and the 2004 Multicultural Training and Global Career Conference.

For Coates and Redfern, the tsunami was not their first experience with the horror of mass carnage. They visited the genocide museum outside of Phnom Penh, which memorializes the 3 million Cambodians murdered by their government, as depicted in the 1984 movie “The Killing Fields.” Coates’ book about contemporary Cambodia, “Cambodia Now: Life in the Wake of War,” will be published this spring by McFarland & Co.

“The tsunami's aftermath and Cambodia's killing fields are not really comparable,” said Coates in an e-mail interview. “Yet they are both somber and spooky in their own ways. With the killing fields you have to imagine the tragedy, as it happened so long ago and all that remain are piles of bones and people's stories. Also, in Cambodia, the killing was much slower and more methodical. Generally, a few people here, a few people there were taken away and killed every day over the course of a few years. Many were buried immediately after digging their own graves. But in Khao Lak, Thailand, the death was all right there, hundreds and hundreds of corpses laid out on the ground, rotting.”

Psychiatrists say that environmental disasters are easier to cope with than the slaughter by other humans, Coates said. “It’s far more difficult to accept the continual human rights abuses and government-sponsored killings we see around us in the region,” she said. “Those killings are just plain wrong, whereas you can't really call nature right or wrong. It simply is.”

The Sept. 11 attack had a profound effect on Coates and Redfern. They quit cushy jobs in small-town America to examine post-war and post-oppression societies — hoping to broaden Americans' understanding of the world. Their stories have ranged from political subjects to environmental and social topics such as a National Wildlife Magazine story about the nearly extinct Cambodian royal turtle.

"We also go after whatever interests us, and that's a lot, which is actually a bit of a problem,” they wrote. “We're never short on ideas, just time.”

photo courtesy of Jerry Redfern

J-School alums Jerry Redfern and Karen Coates on their porch in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Coates and Redfern now earn a living freelancing in Asia, but it was not easy to get started. It took them several years to establish contacts in the region, learn the area, sign up with a photo agency and earn the trust of magazine editors. The cost of living is low in Thailand, and life is comfortable.

“We rarely know when or how the work will come in, or when clients will pay” they report. One “really, really big newspaper back East” took six months to pay, Redfern said. “I wish this were an isolated example, but it's not. I don't know of another profession that operates this way,” he said.

They consider returning to the United States almost daily. “Thailand is a tourist paradise, but a difficult place to actually live as a foreigner. The work is wildly interesting, making thoughts of returning to daily newspapers rather, um, dull,” said Redfern.

Their time at the UM J-School helped prepare them for what they do now, Redfern said.

“The UM J-School taught invaluable lessons in hands-on journalism and ethics,” he said. “We regularly meet people over here who literally wake up one day and decide to become journalists, people with no background in journalism at all. Their skills and knowledge seem to come from movies and eavesdropping on journalists telling tales in bars. We've seen lots of photographers setting up shots, reporters fudging quotes, journalists taking freebies and all sorts of other dubious ethical violations. The three excuses given are: ‘Well, it's only Asia.’ ‘Who's going to know?’ or, ‘Everybody else does it, too.’ It is often startling to see the shoddy reporting that comes out of Asia and runs around the world, at all levels.”

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