I’ve had a hard time deciding what to write about for this blog post. It seems that there are too many words to describe what we’ve seen and experienced, and at the same time there are no words. How do you accurately describe seemingly endless poverty, or unmerited generosity from people who have absolutely nothing? Even those simple words don’t reflect what I’ve seen with my eyes and with my camera. 

Curveballs. It’s an interesting title for this blog post, but it is an accurate depiction of this week so far, specifically today. It’s never straight and always unexpected. I started this week expecting to photograph more (since I was the team photographer) and to help build a house . The camera is a wonderful tool, but it gets in the way of hugs and tickling children most of the time. But for me, it’s also always been a safe way for me to disengage - like most photojournalists are supposed to. But when an orphan with the biggest grin you’ve ever seen comes running at you with arms up in the air, begging to be held, the camera gets tossed aside. I had planned on loading the 13gb of photos I’ve already taken on my own laptop to begin processing, but that crashed and died on Sunday. Not quite what I expected, but God has a reason for I suppose.

We have seen a lot of curveballs this week. Today I want to talk about two. I am on the team that is working on building the house for the widow. She showed up again today, with her three young daughters dressed in their very best frilly dresses. They were gorgeous! So we started working right away! We had worked maybe 30 minutes to an hour when a two men show up. One was a private land surveyor, and the other was a man who apparently owned the land we were digging on. And he apparently did not like said digging. He had the paperwork showing his ownership and we screeched to a halt. What?!? Come on! A curveball. Apparently there was some sort of land dispute as to who owned which part of the particular land we were digging on. Needless to say I was frustrated. I wanted to continue working! I wanted to accomplish something for this widow and her family! And all we could do, was pack up our shovels and pick axes. There was nothing we could do.

But we had a curveball of our own!

We had noticed a perfectly good field for whiffleball. And we just so happened to have one! So we got a fun little game of whiffleball going! None of these children had any idea about baseball. So we had to teach them how to swing the bat, try to hit the ball and run the bases! We had another slight curveball to the game too. When you arrived at the base, you didn’t stop on the base… you instead ran into the waiting arms of one of us, giving the biggest best twirliest hug ever! It was so much fun to love on these kids, and watch them not even care about the bases. Their whole point to hitting that ball was to run full throttle into someone’s arms who didn’t even know them, but to shower them with love. 

This week has so much uncertainty still ahead of us. We’ll make plans for sure, and they will most likely change at the last minute. But that’s ok by us. We’re getting pretty used to curveballs. 

- Josh

Note: I tried uploading this several times yesterday, and the internet was constantly down. Anyway, here is the post a day late :)