“No, don’t take picture, no!” He says laughing while washing his face in the street. 

“HANDS!!” The whole community gathers to hear a simple lesson on sanitation.

“Most of these women have been waiting outside the gate since 4am..” A worker says as they take food tickets from women waiting for their share of 50lb rice bags. 

“Don’t tell anyone I let you sit there.” The heavy equipment operator yells to me from the cab of the excavator as I climb down.

“(Something in Arabic)“ A Jordanian UN soldier says to a women posing for a camera phone shot.

CLICK photos to see BIG

The Navy Seabees helped remove a delicate altar from a destroyed church in Grand Goave

Waiting outside a food distribution

Since 4am.

50lbs of rice.

Millions of gallons

Hand Washing

Demolition and rubble removal

You can help, and it’s easy. Check out our work www.samaritanspurse.org.

Here are some photos from the Samoa Tsunami Relief trip late last year.  I walked around a market and had fun interacting with these people, and was surprised at their openness.  The last few are some I just wanted to throw in because they were interesting to me, and since this is my blog I get to do things like that.

CLICK FOR BIG

I would have sent this one to him, but he said he doesn’t have an email address. He looks pretty BA if you ask me.

LOVE his hair.

These kids had fun posing for me.  We turned it into a game.

]]> http://www.thegoodlight.com/archives/898/feed 0 http://www.thegoodlight.com/archives/881 http://www.thegoodlight.com/archives/881#comments Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:39:02 +0000 paul http://www.thegoodlight.com/?p=881 It was Sept. 30th, Mikala and her family were heading to the hospital in a van to have the kids checked up on.  Just another beautiful Wednesday on the Pacific island of Samoa.  Then the ordinary day turned not-so-ordinary.  A 30ft wave, that officials said came with much less warning than a normal tsunami crashed the shore and tumbled the van end over end off of the road and into the homes.  Two of her daughters, aged 2 and 10, were swept out of the van.  The father tried to go after them, but it was too late.

Mikala’s baby was in her arms the whole time and had drowned in the struggle to get to higher ground.  As she sat in the trees pleading and praying to God for life to come back she began to give the baby mouth to mouth.  The baby coughed back to life to Mikala’s relief.

Over 100 people died on Samoa that day with more homes destroyed.  The people have been diligently working to get their communities back to order. Samaritan’s Purse is helping them in the effort by providing kitchen kits, hygiene kits, and tools.  It was so nice being able to help a people group that wasn’t expecting someone to help them.  Check out samaritanspurse.org if you think you’d like to be involved.

It is in Filipino culture to smile off tragedy, so the people of the town were all remarkably in good spirits. After several months of this flooding, disease is going to be rampant.  The people will have to leave their homes, maybe to never return again.

I can’t imagine the feeling.

I’m now in Samoa covering a completely different tragedy.  A Tsunami swept through killing several, and destroying most.  More pics to come…

Click photos to see BIG

I swear this kid was smirking at me.

]]> http://www.thegoodlight.com/archives/866/feed 0 http://www.thegoodlight.com/archives/851 http://www.thegoodlight.com/archives/851#comments Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:14:14 +0000 paul http://www.thegoodlight.com/?p=851 It was only a brief moment today, 5 minutes max.  On our way to see some work being done we drove by a very low income area.  These people were living in the median of the street.  Kids were playing jacks in the highway.  We stopped to get a few images and ended up near some people sitting by their make-shift homes. So far this trip the kids have been overwhelmingly excited and smiley when I point my camera towards them, however these in particular had a somber blank stare.  Maybe they had been sniffing glue, maybe they were just spacing out, but they lacked that energy that makes a kid a kid.  It’s almost like they’ve been forced at such an early age to be a grown up.

One cute little girl in particular posed a bit for me. Later on I was in the middle of flipping through the images of the day, checking for focus and composition, next ,next, delete, next…  It was almost as if a voice in my head said “Stop. Look…”   I didn’t noticed at the time I was taking the photo, but there were several wounds and lesions on the girls legs and arms, and she had a swollen right eye.  All of a sudden the photo morphed in my head from pixels to a real human being.  One that didn’t have a means to help herself.

Sitting here in my hotel room, far from that tent in the median, I’m trying to imagine what Jesus would have done if he were on that street with me.  Would he have stood there with arms crossed feeling sad for the kids, of course, but also thinking of how he needed to get going to the next thing? Or would he have gone to them, sat with them, held them, and with tears streaming down his face told them “You WILL NOT live another day like this!”

We left them with some food and cooking/hygiene kits but it’ll never be enough.  I keep wondering, is Jesus under that tent with that little girl tonight?

Stop. Look...

It’s been 3 weeks now and things are just now starting to get back to normal for these people.  We are headed down south this morning to a much more rural area where people are still digging themselves out.  Wanted to give a quick look so far as to what I’ve seen.

The craze among multimedia journalists like myself is being able to shoot beautiful video along with the beautiful photos on assignment, without the extra gear. Cameras like this one and the Canon 5d mk2 allow just that. I’ll be heading to the Philippines and the Samoan Islands to cover the flooding/earthquake damage in a week and really look forward to putting together some stories with this fella.

I did a really quick and dirty video of co-worker extraordinaire David Morrison to test the integration with Final Cut Pro. The conclusion?

Beautiful image, decent control.

On a side product-testing note. The above image was processed through Imagenomic’s Portraiture. It picks out skin blemishes and wipes them away leaving the movie star inside of us all. I went on the extreme side with this image just to make Dave look super gloss, but it is highly adjustable. I’m going to mess with it some more before I decide to buy, but it seems like a great product.

Earlier this year I visited an orphanage in the south of Sudan and met a little boy named Aqui.  Actually I should say he met me with a big hug.  I was taking photos around the orphanage when all of a sudden I felt little hands wrap around my legs.  I look down to see a little boy holding on tight.  I put the camera away, scooped him up, and remember noticing how light he was as he laid his head on my shoulder.  This boy doesn’t know me from Adam, but I felt a genuine acceptance and love come from him as he had his arms around my neck.

The orphanage he lives at is called Harvesters, which I’ve written about before.  They need support, little kids like Aqui need help.  Think about it, and then help. Simple. Right?

Here’s a little video of the scene I was talking about.  Warning: It’s meant to tug at the heart strings.  Cue dramatic music…now.