a love fest

Okay, I'm going to hit you hard with images now. That's because over the course of the past two days at the orphanage I have made A LOT of pictures. I have fallen in love with the children, and some have fallen for me, as well. It has been fun, sad, challenging, wonderful, inspiring, heart wrenching and glorious to walk into the lives of these kids and their teachers.






I managed to borrow a cool little audio device from Kirsten and went about the business of recording the kids singing and giving testimonials just before lunchtime. We started outside, but the mic was so sensitive, it was picking up the breezes that were blowing. So we moved into a tiny, cramped room - with a tin roof and metal doors and the most amazing acoustics ever! We decided we could not have found a better recording studio in all of Uganda. I am hoping that my sweet son, Max, who is a budding sound engineer, will help me edit this and put together a CD of their songs, which I will send to them and which I will listen to during those times that I'd like to be transported back to that small, damp, crowded and very dark room (the power kind of comes and goes there) when those uplifted faces and angelic voices washed over me. I have goosebumps still.

I have usually been pretty good at detaching myself from horrific situations that I am photographing. It's not until later, like when I'm back home in the (wet or dry) darkroom printing the pictures that I break down. Today, however, I could not quite keep it together when a little boy named Nicholas was telling me the story of how the rebels came into his village in Northern Uganda, killed his grandmother and his father, and dragged him away, and he got tears in his huge eleven year old eyes as he began to tell me what happened to his mother, and he couldn't go on anymore. I think you get the picture.

One more quick little tidbit about today. I had given disposable cameras to two of the children yesterday. I retrieved them today so I can have the pictures made in Kampala and take them back to the orphanage. The little girl photographer asked me if I could please leave her the "house" and just take the film. She wanted to keep the little green plastic camera body as a "memory list" of my visit.