I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: when you go on the World Race, there is truly no room for expectations. And as I’ve found recently, you can’t even expect to make it back to America with some of your most precious memories.
As devotees will know, I have posted more than my share of photos and videos from the Race thus far, and these are incredibly near and dear to me. I pride myself in my work as a videographer, and I’ve had big plans for what to do with much of the footage post-race… and I’m not normally one for journalling, so I like to consider my photos as my outlet for a journal.
Naturally all these materials can take up a lot of memory on a computer, so as the Race has progressed, I have been storing everything on my 1 TB external hard drive (a purchase I would consider a necessity for all future Racers).
Here’s the problem though: as I found out the hard way, no matter how much protection you put on a hard drive, they are still nothing but a pile of breakable nuts and bolts… or such is my understanding of computers.
As my teammate Kevin and I sat down to watch the season finale of Survivor, my hard drive took a small tumble from roughly 2 feet in the air; hardly it’s worst collision. But when I attempted to open some video files, sure enough, everything on my hard drive had been wipes clean, with nothing remaining but an empty folder staring back at me.
Strangely, I kept my composure, and have yet to experience the full-blown freakout that is inevitable. I really have no answer for what I’m going to do about these lost files, but for now my only hope is to find the external hard drive’s equivalent of a neurosurgeon when I get back to America, as the Thai tech support teams didn’t seem to hold out much hope.
With my video and photographic memories long gone, I at least had the hope of retaining my pitiful excuse for a written journal: nothing more than a notebook with a short description of activities we did each day. The book was more used for writing out language translations or ministry contact information.
But as fate would have it, somewhere throughout the month, said journal also went missing. There’s no real explanation for it; one day it was under my bed, and a few days later it wasn’t. And now I only have my not-so elephant-like memory to rely on for my World Race memories.
I wish this story had a happy ending… which may be yet to come. Perhaps my hard drive will be restored and my notebook was accidentally placed in someone else’s luggage.
But reality tells me that those are both pretty big long shots. And I will only have to fall back on the words of wisdom that I’ve been all too happy to dole out to others: The best camera you can find is simply in your mind.
