Two years ago my dad and I spent a week in Bolivia with a group from our church. Yes, a mission trip. I was the official photographer and it was my job to document our experience- the planning, the daily activities and interactions with people, the decompression afterwards, and even the marathon travel days that book-ended the trip (and I do mean marathon literally, time wise). They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I took almost that many pictures in a ten-day time period and I feel that didn’t begin to describe the experience. I certainly couldn’t do it in ten thousand words.
Pictures and words are still paltry ways to describe what I experienced. They cannot capture what the other senses do- the sound of bugs at night or the cacophony of bird calls in the morning, pop songs on the radio and folk songs on stage, the smells of a market, flowers along a path or food cooking, the taste of a different culture’s food, a dog leaning into your leg as you pet it, the sound of people laughing as they work together, a hug freely given.
Each day was a whirlwind of activity leaving me exhausted. As in the rest of life, this trip was filled with big and small moments that took my breath away and left me feeling warm. I often lay awake, my mind abuzz with dozens of small moments. I also felt a little overwhelmed with the responsibility of capturing as many aspects of our experience as I could while soaking in the experience for myself. I think that any one day would have been difficult to narrow down to ten moments and could not be captured in a picture. We took a trip to a natural history museum with a group of kids who came to the church-operated center for homework assistance. Though the museum was only about thirty minutes away, it was a world away economically.
How do you capture a sister and brother’s eyes wide and lit up by the natural history museum? Or how do you show the dedication of the day to day efforts by the staff at Tiu’ Rancho, the excitement of kids flying kites they had made themselves, the chatter of kids making god’s eyes? And how do I capture my own feelings of walking through fields in the golden setting sun, learning about the area surrounding the center, or working on an apartment with those who would live in it? Snippets and snatches. Madres and moments. Sunflowers and sunsets. A quick shutter sometimes caught the fleeting feelings, but often they were only stored in my eyes and my memory.
Lil Bee Writes 