Anyway, I love staying busy as much as the next traveling homeschooling working mom of four, but sometimes, when you've finished putting on a spontaneous photography exhibit for underprivileged children in South America, you've gotta stop and breathe for a second. Look back, take stock, and write a blog post.
That's right, thanks to the marvelous photography of the children living at the Fundación Niños de los Andes, and the support of the staff there, we were invited to show the kids' work at the Centro Colombo Americano, a prestigious cultural center that has sites in every city in Colombia. The exhibit will be up for another week and half, but we had our big inauguration three nights ago, in which there were lots of art patrons, lots of kids, lots of friends, and even a TV news crew!
Como se dice, "I'm totally not ready for my close up."
And I did it all by myself, without messing up once.
HA! or JA! Right. First, we have established that I did almost none of it by myself. Now, let's get to the error-riddled road that got me here, and gets me anywhere I go.
First, a flashback, if you will. About one year ago, I was here, in beautiful Colombia, at the Fundación Niños de los Andes school, teaching English to about twenty of the aforementioned Niños. I read a sentence aloud and asked a student to repeat it. She did, but made a mistake in her pronunciation. When I provided a gentle friendly correction, the rest of the class laughed at her.
I cut that nonsense out right away, saying,
"Listen! Do not laugh at somebody who makes a mistake because that person is doing something great. She is learning. Look at me, here, making mistakes with almost every sentence, but nevertheless I am here, working and getting better. That is how new things are learned."
Although it probably sounded something like,
"HEAR! No to laugh for anyone who is mistaking. She are making pretty! Her am learning! Watch at me, I mistake all but anyway here I do gooder. Those is things new can knowing!"
Well, the kids all looked at me for a second. I didn't know if I had just blown their minds with a profound truth, or if they were all trying to figure out what the heck I said, but they stopped laughing at any rate, so I was happy and continued the English lesson.
Back to Thursday night. It was the culmination of many weeks of planning, hard work, and flat-out flubs. Shall I list them for you? Well, some of them anyway.
1. I left the USA with six cameras and a healthy supply of rechargeable batteries for the cameras that didn't have their own. Those rechargeable batteries never worked when I needed them. I charged them for days in the house where I am staying, and nada. Buying regular batteries as a stop gap measure got expensive, but that's how I managed. Somewhere close to the end of the photography aspect of the project, someone asked me, "Why didn't you go to Home Center and buy rechargeables?" Duh, I didn't know you had them here. Whoops.
2. From the beginning, we worked with groups of five kids at a time, giving each child one hour of photographic phreedom to roam the grounds of their foundation and take pictures. In order to label the files on my computer, and keep straight who took what photos, I asked the kids to write their names in a little notebook I kept with me, never checking to make sure that they had written a complete name. When I organized the photos into folders on my computer, I was stuck, sometimes with just a barely legible first name.
In the end, when we were surprised by the news that we would be putting on a show, I had to sort back through all those names, and all those kids, sometimes with four Danielas standing in a row, asking, "Who took this photo?"
3. I never figured out how to program ^this^ camera to stop showing a date, so all of the photos taken with it had to be cropped.
This doesn't even scratch the surface, especially when you consider all the bungled Spanish I had to use at every turn. So many things I would do differently, if I had the chance.
Here's the thing I learned from all of this. You can dream big, you can plan a lot, you can have the best help, but if you can't breathe and work through an error, you will get stuck.
A couple of weeks ago, as I served coffee and snacks to a team of people helping me whittle 1000 photos down to a showable 100, they asked me, "This photo? Who took it? It just says Camila." I admit to sweating a bit in that moment, wishing I could go back and do it over again, hating myself for being too disorganized and unprepared, feeling a small but strong wave of self-doubt. Instead of looking for a hidey-hole and a soft blanket, I just said, "I mistaked. Wish I can do again, but we must encounter the child after we decide the names." And you know what? They just nodded, said okay, and went on. End of the world, it wasn't.
Who on this earth has attempted to learn a new language and started off fluent? Who on this earth has picked up a musical instrument for the first time and played it like a virtuoso? Who on this earth has tried to push themselves from their present reality to a future dream without having to accept his or her limitations?
Acceptance doesn't mean complacency. Pushing oneself to get better is a fine way to spend a lifetime. Acceptance means not spending a great deal of time and energy on self-punishment, or even worse, self-defeating fear that could stop you from trying in the first place. Taking on something new usually means not being that great at it, for a while at least.
photo by Kellen Ramirez
It takes a special mix of humility and confidence to remember that the road to someplace outside of you current abilities is a bumpy one, paved with reminders of your short-comings; but that it's well worth traveling.
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