Snap Shot

Today I made the rounds of all the worksites around the project. There are 2 major construction projects happening here.

One of the projects is an addition of a staff quarters to the hospital. Right now they are still making the bricks for the building and the foundation. So I went over to the large field set aside for the brick construction. 8 men are working on the production of the bricks. They gather the soil that is provided free of cost by local farmers who wish to have the level of their filed lowered for better irrigation. They haul sand from the river that is 4km away. And they pump water from a local well to produce copious amounts of mud. This mud mix is then poured into wooden brick molds. After that the brick-shaped-mud is set to dry in the sun for one day on each side. Doing all this by hand, they 8 men produce 5,000 – 6,000 bricks per day.

The other project is a public restroom. The local village of Juanga has less toilets than homes. Most people go to the bathroom right out in the fields. This toilet project will hopefully give them somewhere else to do their business.

After my rounds and pictures, I spent some time teaching Manu how to take a picture. I am not a photographic genius. I barely qualify as photographically inept. I am personally unable to tolerate the site of any photo I take. Still, the photos I take are of a western style, and the people who fund the project are from a western country, and they have certain expectations of what a picture should be, and that is what I am trying to teach Manu.

For the most part, all the people at the hospital have absolutely no clue what people in the western world would find interesting or engaging in a photograph. Most of the time when a friend of mine shows me some photos they have taken, or one of their friends have taken, it is 3 people standing shoulder to shoulder in front of… something. The “something” is usually a temple, ocean, or car. And the people are never smiling. It is rare to see someone smiling in a photograph here. Even when I want to take a picture I need to coax a smile out of my friends here. I have resorted to tickling.