My father requested an upped quota for blogs, so here comes a bunch.
Missing Pictures
I love my camera. Absolutely love it. Thank you dad for supporting me and helping me buy it. It has been the thing (material that is) that has brought me the most joy on the trip so far. A true photographer is merely an unseen eye; an observer of time and space around them. Without sounding too artsy, taking pictures is an aquired skill – one that I am slowly learning. Its not just pressing a button – it is synchronizing yourself with the world around you. The balance of living in the moment while simultaneously acting as if you are independent of the time in order to capture the split moment in existence that would otherwise vanish or retain itself in memory.
Rant aside, I find myself getting attached to the pictures and video I'm taking. This is unfortunate – especially when one loses 233 pictures from a gypsy village that cannot be relived. Intro story:
Acho is a large Hungarian man that runs a small cell phone shop out of the bottom of the youth center (where church is held and ministry is run out of). Acho, like myself, has an affinity for the art of photography. He and I are always taking pictures at the same time during the same events. We even go so far as to play a little game of "Enemy at the Gates" (if you don't get that reference, I highly suggest going to the nearest video rental store and requesting a copy) in which we stalk each other and try to capture the other in the process of taking a picture. Anyway. The day after we get back from a day trip to a gypsy village, I gesture to him through charades that I have new pictures (communicating without words is also a learned art). As I'm putting the chip into my computer to download my pictures, he pulls me away and down to his computer in his shop where he takes my chip and tries to load the pictures onto his computer. What happened from there is a foggy memory that runs in slow mo when I recall it. The pictures started to download, but a few minutes in, an error message flashes saying that the the photo chip has no pictures on it. I had no idea what had happened and neither had Acho. As he tried and tried to locate any of the pictures on the chip, I sat quiet with a wide range of emotions taking turns with my attitude. First I was mad at Acho – stupid man! I never should have trusted him with my chip! He didn't know what he was doing! Then the anger turned onto myself. Stupid Steve! Why had I not listened to myself and just downloaded my pictures onto my own computer?! It was my fault for giving it to Acho in the first place! I should have known better. After ten minutes of trying to recover the pictures, Acho turned to me and said in his limited English, "Sorry". Still fighting the inner emotions, I gave a weak "Its OK" and went upstairs as he tried some more.
I went to the small kitchen in the back of the youth center and closed the door for some alone time. I sat there thinking about my lose and feeling frustration and heartbreak for a good hour. Now, this may seem over emotional and pathetic to you, but understand where I was coming from. On this trip, I see probably around 200 new faces a day. I can't possibly remember every place I've been and everyone I've meet. Sooner or later, they all mesh into one big experience. That is why the pictures are so important to me. They are the only real proof I have to recollect individual events and places from the mass of meshed memory. If I lose those pictures, its like losing those people from my experiences. They are erased forever to me; lost in the tidal wave of new experiences that replace the old in my mind daily.
So there I sat, soaking in the thought that I had lost those faces and experiences forever. Now, I don't know how well you know me, but the people who know me well know that small instances such as these set me off on deep philosophical meditation sessions that apply to the bigger picture. I reverted to my existential thinking. Just like the pictures, at the end of the day, everything we do in life will be forgotten and erased. Just like the pictures, all memory of what we did and who we are will be lost. There will never be a picture of us. Just like the pictures, we will be erased from existence, wiped from the mind of humanity, becoming the forgotten past as are every people who came before us. Healthy thoughts for a Christ following missionary who is suppose to be bringing hope, huh?
But after a while, I started thinking of my dad. My dad is alot wiser than I usually give him credit (but thats the way it always seems to work – in the words of my father, "the older you get, the smarter your parents seem to be"). He always preaches independence and taking a hold of your destiny. That no matter where you find yourself in life, what situation you are knee deep in, you can always change your attitude towards it. One's attitude is the last of the God given freedoms that no one can take away. So, I started to think. The pictures are gone. They're never coming back. Stop sulking in that fact. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Get up and do something. Do not be a victim of life. Own it.
So I bucked up and made the decision not to let the pictures get to me. And of course, these thoughts carried over to my bigger philosophical battle. If at the end of the day, all we are is dust and nothing matters, then I'm gonna make one hell of a dust storm. At the end of the day, those pictures of people don't matter. Its the brief intersection in life that we shared that matters. The pictures may be gone, but those people are still living out their everyday lives today, tomorrow, and hopefully for many more days. I saw them for one day and after that day, they seemingly cease to exist to me because I can't see them. But they are there. And there is possibility that they were influenced today by the one day we came in contact. So I learned that I must make those interactions count. Because like the pictures, i will never get them back.
There is a sweet ending to the story. After a few days of trying different programs to locate the pictures and asking a couple of friends to do the same, the defeated Acho returned my chip to me with a sad sorry. I tried with a last glimmer of hope to try once more on my computer to no avail. So I put the chip back in my camera bag and went about with life. Two weeks later in a gypsy village, I reached into my camera bag for a blank chip since mine had filled up. Plopping the "lost pictures" chip in the camera, I started snapping away. Minutes later, I checked to see how the pictures were turning out and was meet with a "Error – the camera chip might be damaged. Please Replace". I sighed and tried to take one more picture to see if it would work. I have no idea what happened, but almost every single "lost" picture came back on that chip.
I could give you an explanation such that the computer Acho plugged the chip into reformatted the chip and "hid" the files, then once I plugged it back into my camera it automatically reformatted everything. Or you can wonder, like I am now, if getting these pictures back was a little miracle from a God that reminds us that we are never lost pictures.
