Joy and I were lucky to be able to volunteer at Wildflower Home east of Chiang Mai in Thailand this February. For two weeks, we ran a camera project with the resident women, along with the director, assistant director, the cook and a couple other eager women. We were delighted to receive a digital P+S camera donation from the Salvation Army just before we left, along with a few old digital cameras from colleagues, and were able to take 14 cameras to donate to the foundation. It was quite a hoot having to memorize how to work all these cameras, though luckily some were duplicates! I’m sure Wildflower must have wondered what they’d gotten themselves in for when we spent hours the first day grappling to learn them!
This trip, btw, I decided to go with my new Canon G11 instead of hauling along all my gear. I have really gotten tired of the weight, lol, having hauled it to Africa and Bali and Japan and Cuba and Mexico etc. However, I can firmly say that was a great big mistake! Not only was the G11 not working well (it would change settings in Manual, and wouldn’t zoom in video mode…argh), but also the little bit o’ lag time drove me around the twist and caused me to miss EVERY FREAKING SHOT. I didn’t realize how absolutely dependant I am on having the very best equipment, but lord, I am, I am. Never again will I go overseas without. Instead I will try and do without some lenses.
Wildflower Home helps women in crisis, providing food and shelter for up to a year. You can read some of the women’s moving stories at the Wildflower website. They have some land north of Chiang Mai about 45 minutes. They’ve built a fully functioning farm, growing vegetables, raising livestock and manufacturing mud blocks to be used in building, so the women get practical experience along with daily educational sessions…Thai lessons, since many of the women are refugees from nearby Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar, and English lessons to name just two, along with help from lawyers about human rights and immigration. (Speaking of language, since many of the women were learning Thai as a second language, our interpreter had her hands more than full. Some concepts were not translatable, but she was awesome.) The women also participate in making crafts such as elephant pants and purses and jewelry, which they sell at Chiang Mai markets.
Each woman had exclusive use of a camera of-her-own for the duration of the course, and learned about such basics as how to put in and extract memory cards and how to recharge batteries. Then it was on to learning about light and composition…how to make use of textures and lines, the rule of thirds, filling their frames, getting down on a child’s level, and so on. Joy and I were very touched by the women’s great happiness at learning how to make photographs of their little ones and lives–I think it must have been a really great break from the usual stresses of living in crisis. All of us know just how much we cherish our photos, and these women did too. We were so fortunate to have the services of an enthusiastic and able translator, Supaporn Sumpet, from ProThailand.
We met in a stilted hut during the blistering hours of the day. The warm season had arrived early, and even with a fan, we were dripping. Architect Michael Thaibinh, who with his wife, Elizabeth Lachowsky Thaibinh, founded Wildflower Home, has designed the new site buildings out of mud bricks; these keep their occupants warm when it’s cold, and cool when its warm. The new building going up has a bottle-walled spiral meditation room–the orange “room” on the top will be a site-wide water purification system.
At the end of the course, along with a diploma, Joy and I gave the women each a small gift of cash so that they could purchase prints if they wanted (or buy diapers, since their babies go without most of the time). You can see some of the women’s own photographs at the ProThailand/David Jackson Facebook page. Hopefully I can also post some of them here, but right now, I’m having compatibility issues.
Joy is a Vancouver doctor, so she also gave an informative talk on reproduction and birth control. Many of the women had never seen illustrations of their reproductive organs and did not understand the mechanics of conception. I know they found this fascinating and useful (and let’s just say some cucumbers were put to good use!). Joy also was able to dispel some myths, such as that using diapers or carrying babies on hips does not cause babies’ legs to bow, and that it isn’t necessary to tug legs straight. It also doesn’t change the shape of a baby’s nose to pull it out to the shape you want it to be.
What really surprised and delighted Joy and I was the women’s facility with their cameras. Although shooting mostly in “Auto” they were able to make very good images, even, sometimes, causing our mouths to drop in true awe at the moments caught.
This month, we are collecting comments for the Vancouver organization Pacific Post Partum Support Society. Each comment you leave on any blog post garners the organization $1, up to a monthly total of $200.
These are my images, with a couple that others took with my camera that include me. A note for the photo geek: these are by and large sooc:
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