Only on AP: Heartrending images capture children across the globe who…

A uniquely moving photo-driven project focuses on children coping with the loss of parents to the coronavirus.

Rarely does AP’s Best of the Week award go to an editor. But this week — a particularly strong one for AP with multiple exclusives that could have won on most weeks — the honor is truly deserved by New York-based Top Stories Hub photo editor Alyssa Goodman. Goodman was the driving force behind “Kids Left Behind,” an extraordinarily moving photo package that takes an intimate look at children who have lost parents to the pandemic.

The project, which moved several days after the world topped 4 million dead, was the brainchild of Goodman and New Delhi-based chief photographer Manish Swarup. Goodman worked with photographers around the globe to find many of the subjects, then get permission to photograph and interview them — no easy feat when children are involved.

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Jeshmi Narzary, 10, sits on the stairs of her aunt’s house, June 25, 2021. She lost both her parents in two weeks in May in Kokrajhar, in the northeastern Indian state of Assam. Narzary hasn’t processed the deaths of her parents. But she is scrupulous about wearing face masks and washing her hands. She does so, she said, because she knows “that coronavirus is a disease which kills humans.”

AP Photo / Anupam Nath

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Diego Roman holds his daughter, Victoria Soto, for a photo in Lomas de Zamora, Argentina, July 4, 2021. Victoria was born on April, 13, 2021, and her mother, Elizabeth Soto, died from COVID-19 six days later. Roman says he is coping little by little with the loss, but fears for his baby girl, who one day will learn she has no mother. “I want her to learn to say ‘mom’ by showing her a picture of her,” Roman said. “I want her to know that her mother gave her life for her. Her (mother’s) dream was to be a mom, and she was.”

AP Photo / Natacha Pisarenko

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Kian Navales poses at home in Quezon City, Philippines, July 6, 2021, holding a pillow with a photo of his late father, Arthur, who died from the coronavirus. Kian, who also had the virus, misses going out for noodles with his dad.

AP Photo / Aaron Favila

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Yael Navales poses at home in Quezon City, Philippines, July 6, 2021, with an image of her father, Arthur, who died from the coronavirus. “Our house became quiet and sad. We don't laugh much since papa left,” she said.

AP Photo / Aaron Favila

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Zavion Guzman hugs his sister Jazzmyn while playing in Belleville, N.J., June 30, 2021. Lunisol Guzman adopted the two as babies but she and her partner died last year from COVID-19 at the start of the violent first wave of the pandemic in the U.S. Northeast. The children’s older sisters now care for them. “I lost my mother, but now I'm a mother figure,” said Jennifer Guzman, 29.

AP Photo / Mary Altaffer

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Niva Thakrar, 13, who lost her father to the coronavirus, poses at her home in northwestern London, July 5, 2021. As a way to remember him, she takes the same walks and watches the movies they used to watch together before he died in March after a two-month hospital stay. “I still try to do what we used to do before, but it’s not the same,” Thakrar said.

AP Photo / Thanassis Stavrakis

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Kehity Collantes, 6, poses for a picture with her dog, Niña, in Santiago, Chile, July 4, 2021. Her mother, a hospital worker, died from the coronavirus. “My papa is now also my mama,” she said.

AP Photo / Esteban Felix

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Maggie Catalano, 13, sits for a photo in Riverside County, Calif., July 2, 2021. Maggie’s father, Brian, died of COVID-19 in his home on Dec. 30, 2020. He was 49. Just days before he died he had given Maggie a guitar; she composed and performed a song at his funeral. “I wish he could see me play it now,” she said. “I wish that he could see how much I have improved.”

AP Photo / Jae C. Hong

And what stories they found. An 8-year-old girl in Soweto, South Africa, pining for the father she lost to the disease, a 10-year old in India who lost both parents in a matter of weeks, a young family in the Philippines that has fallen on hard times since husband and father Arthur Navales died in April and a California 13-year-old performing the song she composed for her father’s funeral, on the guitar he gave her for Christmas, days before he died.

Goodman developed a style for the images and coordinated with the photographers to make portraits of the young subjects in a cohesive fashion. Those photographers included Swarup; Natacha Pisarenko, based in Buenos Aires; Jerome Delay, Johannesburg; Thanassis Stavrakis, Athens; Anupam Nath, New Delhi; Esteban Felix, Santiago, Chile; Mary Altaffer, New York; Aaron Favila, Manila; and Jae Hong, Los Angeles, all of whom delivered stirring images. Once the photos were in, Goodman displayed the work — including poignant text by Rome correspondent Nicole Winfield — in a thoughtful, engaging presentation.

The more than 4 million people who have died so far in the coronavirus pandemic left behind parents, friends and spouses — but also young children who are navigating life now as orphans or with just one parent, who is also mourning the loss. https://t.co/uImSWiRuzZ
— The Associated Press (@AP) July 9, 2021

The result was one of the most compelling packages AP has done in recent years. Almost everyone who has spent time with it has been moved to tears, and the images have had impact beyond the websites and newspapers that have featured them. A Philippines Taekwondo instructor saw the Navales children featured in the package and phoned the photographer to see if he could help them. The coach had not known that their father had passed away until he saw the AP gallery. Starting right away, the instructor promised to take the children on as Taekwondo students in his class free of charge until they reach blackbelt. It had been Arthur Navales’ dream.

For generating an inspired and challenging project, handling it with sensitivity and tenaciously seeing it through in collaboration with global colleagues, Alyssa Goodman wins AP’s Best of the Week award.

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Honorable Mentions:

AP Exclusive: US leaves Bagram base; Afghans left in the dark

Kathy Gannon, Rahmat Gul and Mohammed Amin

were quick to deliver an all-formats look — and an exclusive — from Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan after the U.S. departure from the base that served for nearly 20 years as the epicenter of America’s war to unseat the Taliban and hunt down al-Qaida.
Media around the world were watching for the U.S. withdrawal from Bagram, but Gannon, AP’s Afghanistan/Pakistan news director with decades of hard-won experience in the region, broke news. First, she pressed for access to the base after the U.S. military's July 2 departure. Joined by Kabul-based video journalist Amin and photographer Gul, the trio were granted access on July 5 and arrived to provide a rare glimpse of what had been the largest U.S. military base in the country.
But that access was only one element of the story. The new Afghan commander of Bagram was initially reluctant to share details about how he and his troops took control of the base. Gannon told him there had been rumors about looting, and with her persistent questioning, the commander finally shared the full story: U.S. troops left quietly, switched off the lights and never bothered to tell the Afghan military that they were gone. The gap of two hours between the U.S. departure and the arrival of the Afghan military at Bagram enabled looters to sneak into the once heavily guarded base.
The story made a splash, with Gannon fielding interview requests from major news outlets to describe what she had seen and heard at Bagram. The Pentagon, facing criticism after Gannon’s story appeared, later said the Afghans had been informed two days in advance of the U.S. intention to leave, but that the precise hour was left secret for security reasons. The team’s all-formats reporting provided an early look at the post-U.S. era in Afghanistan, in a package that was stunning for its detail and news value.
https://aplink.news/95e
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AP: Myanmar military, police declare war on medics

Kristen Gelineau and Victoria Milko

continued AP’s dominant coverage of Myanmar’s unrest, this time revealing how Myanmar security forces were deliberately and systematically attacking medics in the middle of the pandemic. In an extremely difficult story to report, the AP team was able to track down health workers who were in hiding and carefully contacted them using encrypted apps.
One interviewee spoke of a newborn in the embattled town of Mindat who had died due to suspected pneumonia because his parents could not find a doctor. Going on scant information, AP finally broke that story open thanks to a tweet by someone in Myanmar referencing the baby's death that included the parents' names. Stringers then overcame bad communications, an adversarial military and monsoon season to locate the parents of the dead child in a refugee camp. The resulting story by Sydney-based Gelineau and Jakarta-based Milko was one of heartbreak and sensitivity with disturbing but compelling video produced by multiformat journalist Allen Breed, including medics being beaten by police, and photos that laid out how, despite the brutality, the health care workers continued trying to save lives.
Physicians for Human Rights called it an ”amazing piece,” and the “deepest dive” so far into the attack on doctors in Myanmar. It was shared on Twitter by prominent human rights advocates and called a “gripping and important investigation” and a “devastating investigative report.”
https://aplink.news/o02
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Making the US economy relatable: Dude, where’s my chair?

Josh Boak

found a way to take readers beyond the eye-glazing phrase “supply chain economics” by illustrating the current U.S. economy — the reasons behind its strengths and vulnerabilities — through the very relatable lens of patio furniture shortages.
The story angle grew from a shopping trip with his wife to a couple of stores to look for a flowerpot. Boak, a White House reporter who specializes in the economy, noticed the paucity of patio furniture in the showrooms and began pulling up inflation reports. He then talked to managers at garden supply companies about their travails and emerged with a story that told the tale of the U.S. economy through this small slice of it. “There is the paradox of the fastest growth in generations at more than 6% yet also persistent delays for anyone trying to buy furniture, autos and a wide mix of other goods,” he wrote.
Boak’s story, anchored at a garden supply store in Cockeysville, Maryland, and accompanied by Julio Cortez’s photos, was among AP’s top stories in pageviews for the day and continued to attract interest days later. https://aplink.news/cdy

AP delivers rare visuals inside deadly Bangladesh factory fire

Al-Emrun Garjon and Mahmud Hossain Opu

managed to get where other journalists did not: inside a tragic factory fire that killed dozens of workers who were locked inside the food and beverage factory outside Bangladesh’s capital. Police initially gave a toll of three dead, but the following afternoon firefighters discovered 49 more bodies, many of whom were trapped inside by an illegally locked door.
Video journalist Garjon and photographer Opu had scrambled to the scene as soon as the scale of the tragedy became clear. Once there, they got inside the factory and despite intense heat and smoke, captured dramatic scenes of firefighters, with Garjon setting up an exclusive livestream using the Bambuser app on his iPhone as rescuers searched for bodies amid the burning debris. The pair’s video and and still images of firefighters’ efforts and the grim consequences of the blaze set AP's all-formats coverage apart on this latest industrial disaster in Bangladesh.
https://aplink.video/196
https://aplink.news/yot
https://aplink.video/wsq

Best of the Week — First Winner

July 16, 2021

Only on AP: Heartrending images capture children across the globe who lost parents to COVID

Featured Honorable Mention

AP Exclusive: US leaves Bagram base; Afghans left in the dark

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