portraits chapter closing...

WOW! It's official 1000 portraits, taken, printed, framed and almost all delivered! We shot a few "clean up" photos this morning and then went to a going away party for one of the NGO workers here. Actually..I kinda shot portraits all day for our translators and stuff, so it was busy, but fun! The team leaves tomorrow and I'll spend part of the day doing some last minute printing and organizing...basically tieing up the loose ends. It's been fun, but I'm pretty excited to be done with it.

The photo in this post is of a guy name Pawang, he's 84. We took his portrait the very first day and for some reason it got missed back at the editing studio and didn't get printed. Funny thing was that he came EVERY SINGLE DAY to see if we had it yet, and we didn't. Didn't bother him at all, he just sat and "talked" with us anyway...as much talking as two people can do that speak different languages. Anyway, finally I had time so I sat down and edited his photo myself, printed it and got it framed and was able to get a ride to his house to deliver it myself. He was so excited! He invited me to sit down under his house for a while and chat, this time with a translator (at least a guy that had enough English to give me the basic idea of what was happening). The stuff in the photo that he's showing is called Sirih..it's supposed to be good for your teeth...I'm not so sure of it though cause he only had 5 teeth left. It was the best afternoon!

Delivering photos has been such a blessing. The look of joy and excitement on their face when they recieved their photo was priceless! This was a TON of work, but it was well worth it. Tomorrow starts another adventure....more to come later!