Throughout my life I have been fortunate to embrace many different travel opportunities that have broadened my view of the world and have cultivated within me a compassion for people, as well as a desire to tell their stories through broadcast journalism.
I developed a love for travel my freshman year of high school when I accompanied my church youth group on a philanthropic outreach to Panama City, Panama. We traveled in dug-out canoes up the San Juan River and visited remote villages that remain unaffected by the modern world. We supplied the villagers with food, money, and supplies (such as weed-whackers) to aid them in clearing their land, in order to plant crops. After spending two weeks with the Panamanian children, I was certain that I wanted to travel with my youth group again, the following summer.
In June 2004, I traveled with the same church group to El Paso, Texas where we spent three and a half weeks aiding the poverty stricken Mexican citizens who inhabited the border towns in the region. Every day we would pile into a mini-van, laden with food, blankets, and stuffed animals for the children. We would cross the border into Juarez, Mexico and distribute the much needed supplies. For two separate weeks we also set up a children’s day camp at one of the Mexican church compounds. We used our mini-van to transport children from around the city to the church, where we gave them their first taste of summer camp.
I remember spending steaming hot afternoons dressed in a heavy corduroy jump suit, while the sweat on my forehead made the clown make-up I was wearing run down my face. Dressed in costumes, we sang with the children, played games, provided snack, and did art projects. The boys in my group would start soccer games with the scrappy Mexican children, out on the grassless dirt compounds.
Due to these prior experiences, I was not the least bit hesitant to apply as a senior for the Media Efficiency and Democracy in Action (MEDIA) exchange trip to Amman, Jordan. Made possible by the support of the U.S. Department of State and The United Palestinian Appeal (UPA), a local NGO called Project Harmony sent ten American high school students to spend the month of April 2006 in Jordan’s capital, Amman. This was the first exchange program that Project Harmony had sponsored to the Middle East.
After 8 weeks of training in Arabic, as well as cultural education training, we flew sixteen hours to Amman, where we met up with our five Jordanian and five Palestinian refugee counterparts. The exchange trip included supervised trips around Amman where we observed and deconstructed media images, allowing the city's environment to serve as a living classroom. Armed with pens, paper, video cameras, and other media technology, we put our media education skills to work creating video journals and interpreting media images through writing, drawing, and speaking.
We visited multiple organizations such as The Jordanian Hashemite Fund for Development (JOHUD), the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), and The Queen Zein Al-Sharaf Institute for Development (ZENID) where we gained an increased understanding of issues affecting youth in Jordan. We also had the opportunity to visit historically and culturally significant sites such as Petra and Jarash and we spent days traveling through the Palestinian refugee camps of Al-Baqa’a, Wihdat, and Zarqa outside of Amman. There were many times during the trip when I realized that I was witnessing history.
We experienced the culture and traditions of the Middle East firsthand by staying with host families while we were in Jordan. I was also privileged to write a weekly column in the local newspaper back home, where I was interning at the time. I wrote daily accounts of my experiences that I emailed to the editor-in-chief of The Valley Reporter in Waitsfield, Vermont. These accounts were published for the local community and served as a successful means of communication between the MEDIA team members and our local community back home.
This was my first experience as a correspondent for a news agency and it has since proven to be one of the most memorable moments in my life, thus far. During this trip, I became sure of my desire to pursue a career in journalism, continuing to learn about people, cultures, and sharing these experiences with the world.
As an extremely outgoing, charismatic individual, I feel that television broadcast reporting is the best journalistic medium for me to work in. I am an individual who enjoys the fast pace of the broadcast world, as well as the social and performing qualities of the profession. I feel that the personal interaction involved in broadcast can often be the most effective form of journalism. A reporter plays an important role in informing the viewer about topics of the utmost importance in their lives.
By CATHERINE MOORE
