again

Here I am again with only the light of my computer. I am posting more of the images that were previously scattered on the cutting room floor. And I am thinking about the class I took in Uganda one and half years ago.

There has been a flurry of emails recently between the good people who were my fellow participants in the workshop that first took me to Uganda. The workshop was offered by the Maine Photographic Workshops; our teacher was Thatcher Cook. It turns out that while most of us thought we were in Uganda to simply expand our portfolios and to learn about working with NGOs, many of us have gone on to do work that is continuing to benefit the people we met and photographed in east Africa. Some are working in other parts of the world. Here are a few examples:

Tim has continued to help the family he documented in the very small, impoverished and AIDS devastated village of Buyingi. He is helping some of the children from that family buy books and attend secondary school, and he provided assistance when their home was destroyed by floodwaters late last year.

Diane “adopted” a young man from Kampala, who she continues to help support now that he is establishing his own organization to help get kids off the street. She is returning to Uganda this week to do more work with the group of child dancers she documented when we were in Kampala and to see what she can do to further assist her adopted “grandson” with his own altruistic efforts.

Thatcher is off somewhere in Asia making work for a book; he received a Fulbright to do so. Eileen left recently for Malawi, where she will spend nine weeks documenting health care there.

Brian never says no when I ask him to help me with design work for Change the Truth; several in the group have made contributions.

Little did any of us know where that workshop was going to take us. It was a very special group of people, and we grew close over the course of two weeks. As we each continue to work on our own projects and develop our passion for helping, we stay in touch, compare notes and offer encouragement to one another. I think that workshop changed a lot of lives. Sure, we all came home with new bodies of work, but it was so much more than that. Tim included this quote from one Sydney Smith, writer and clergyman (1771 - 1845) in a recent missive: "It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do a little."

At any rate, here are some more "new" old images.