High in the Andes Mountains a cold rain is coming down in sheets and we’ll be lucky if the temperature reaches 50 degrees today. I’m inside an unfinished, unheated building the size of a single-car garage, my hands are like ice, and I can feel a virus coming on. I’ve been hunched over an unfamiliar laptop for hours sucking hundreds and hundreds of digital images out of various digital cameras. Thank goodness for battery power because electricity in this part of Ecuador comes and goes like the March sun at home — and I’ve got a deadline looming. “This,” I find myself thinking, “is one strange way to spend a summer vacation.”
To understand why I spent my summer vacation in the Andes mountains, you need to know that for the past five years I’ve helped organized groups of adults and teens to travel to help build housing in poverty-stricken areas of the world. It can be tough work, but it’s tremendously rewarding.
Last year we took a group to build housing for children at an orphanage in Ecuador. We loved the people and the country so much that we decided to return again this year to help finish the buildings we started the previous summer.
Figure 1: Pennsylvania contractor and team member John Ruch watches a local worker to see how the job should be done.
Pulling it Together
So it was that a few weeks ago I was in one of those buildings — freezing cold hands tapping away at a keyboard and trying to shake the chills wracking my body. I consoled myself with the thought that at least I wasn’t outside constructing concrete block walls in the rain. Instead, I was staying dry while putting together a slide show of our weeklong adventure in Ecuador.
The show was my idea — it was our last day on the construction site and I’d been watching people snap digital photos all week. I was determined to get my hands on those images — I couldn’t wait to see what other people had seen around me. Plus, after a week spent working and living in primitive conditions, I was ready for a technology fix.
Figure 2: Singer, songwriter, and recording artist Steve Garrett learning some songs in Spanish from a group of children at the orphanage.
I wasn’t sure my scheme would work — time was waning and battery power was limited. I was fortunate that I’d been able to cajole a participant who spends his days (and nights) creating Web sites to bring his brand new, state-of-the-art, light-as-a-feather laptop. Someone else brought along a lightweight, but powerful, projector. I provided an eight-in-one digital camera card reader that let the laptop read the chips in all the different digital cameras people were using. If I could get all the hardware to work together and play nice AND we had electrical power to run the projector, we were set.
The hardware cooperated and the power stayed on–later that day we showed 125 digital photos to a group of about 100 people — the group we had brought, along with the children and staff at the orphanage. The show was a big hit and people laughed, applauded, stamped their feet, and cheered. It was the perfect way to wind up the week and to say thanks to our hosts.
Figure 3: The children and the team members loved being together, playing and doing crafts.
Putting on a Show
Looking back on the project, I was happy I could contribute my computer skills along with my organizational ones. I also felt a frisson of surprise — the source of which I had some difficulty locating. The fact that hardware from so many different sources worked without a hitch was definitely a wonder. The irony of the fact that in a third-world country with a per capita income of a few hundred dollars a year I was working with approximately $15,000 of computer equipment did not escape my attention, either.
I was also surprised, and pleased, that the images were so good. Eight people (including me) brought digital cameras along and most of the cameras cost less than $300. Yet, the quality and complexity of the images was astonishing. Ecuador is a wildly beautiful country and the light is so pure that high up (10,000+ feet above sea level) that it’s hard to take bad shots, but overall the quality of the digital camera shots was exceptional. I admit I had not expected such comparatively low-end digital cameras and amateur photographers to turn out such quality. The hardest part of the whole project was deciding which images to show.
Out of the eight cameras came almost a thousand images, but only a handful had to be discarded and only a few needed major retouching. The Web designer had loaded Photoshop 7.0 on the laptop before leaving the States, but the color balance and contrast of most of the shots did not need to be corrected. We used the software to reduce resolution and alter image size, but that’s about all we needed to do.
Now that a few weeks have passed and I’ve had more time to reflect, I think what surprised me most was how much the digital camera and computer technology could affect such a non-technological venture. In 10 minutes, 100 or so images passed in front of people’s eyes, but those images will stay with people for years.
Figure 4: These two girls, along with the other children, loved to see themselves in the digital camera shot previews. Many of the children had never seen themselves in photographs..
With a few hours of work and technology that can fit inside a small suitcase, we had found a way to share images that captured the essence of what we had come to do. In those images we saw people working, playing, exploring, and sharing. The children could see themselves smiling; for many it was the first time they’d seen themselves in a photograph.
Who knew?
To see more images from the trip, visit https://www.wordfm.org and click on the mission trip team link on the home page.
Read more by Molly Joss.
This article was last modified on December 14, 2022
This article was first published on August 5, 2004
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