"Photo Photo Photo"

  

One of my goals while in Africa was to get some pictures of "authentic Africa" for a collage to put on my wall upon return.  I suppose what I really was thinking of was  making a collage of National Geographic on my wall.  You know, the women with stuff on their heads.  The children that look hungry and dirty.  The people out in the distance working the fields.  The poverty and run down market places.  It was sure funny to hear when people looked at my pictures after I got home.  I heard two comments over and over, "it looks like a Compassion International advertisement" and "it's like looking at the pages of National Geographic".  Yes!  Mission accomplished.

 

 









        Well, needless to say, not all of Africa looks that way.  However, it was on more than one occasion that Donna Gasset and I looked at each other and said, "This is the real deal!"  We were not in the tourist areas.  We were in the most remote areas of Africa.  We went to the places most eyes never see.  There were no lions, zebras or elephants but there were huts, dirt floors, older women whose faces carried the weight of the world, the beautiful garbs, beans and rice, babies with flies on them, and more things balanced on heads than I knew possible!

The hardest part about getting pictures was as soon as your camera surfaced you were surrounded by little faces saying, "photo, photo, photo".  Getting my "authentic" pictures proved to be difficult.  I even tried hiding to get a shot, but they would find me!  I don't think they had any idea that those images would end up on paper.  They were just content to see it on the back of our cameras.


Their responses were precious.  The kids would form a mosh pit of sorts to try and see it.  I admit I am slow at times.  It took me a while to realize they had never seen an image of themselves.  They had no idea what they looked like.  Take a minute to wrap your brain around that.

      I decided to walk around while the children were contained at VBS and find the adults.  "Would you like a photo?"  One guy looked at me and rubbed his fingers together as to say, "how much money you got?"  Ha!  It was not for my benefit.  I just wanted to give them a chance to see God's incredible creation of themselves.  I decided to stick to women.

The women were excited at the chance to get a picture.  They would look at the image and laugh.  I figured out they were mostly looking at each other.  Almost as if they were a stranger in the background of your picture that you tend to ignore.  I began taking pictures of individual women so they would know it was them.  When I showed them I would say, "mwiza" which means "beautiful".

I have no idea if they were glad to know what they looked like.  I often look much better in my head than in real life.  In fact, I can feel pretty good about myself until I see a mirror or a picture.  It makes me wonder, do they deal with self image issues like us?  Not knowing what I look like would make it hard to compare myself to others .  If I never saw what I looked like, would I be more likely to believe that how God created me was perfect and beautiful?