Zambia - Africa

I would like to start off this entry with a little bit about what this unforgettable trip was about, and why on earth it took me 4 months too long to share it. :)

In short, our goal as a team was simply this: to establish relationships with those in the community and open up the doors for Poetice International, the organization we partnered with, to help make a difference in the lives of those people. To explain more than that would probably take a novel and I would definitely do so terribly so I won't even try. Instead, I strongly encourage you to take 9 minutes out of your day and watch this video made by Ryan Humm about what is going on in Livingstone, Zambia. 

One of the reasons it took me so long to blog this experience was simply because I always put my client’s needs ahead of my own and put my personal work last… oh, and I suppose I would be lying if I said I didn’t procrastinate personal projects like nobodies business. Cough cough. :) But to be perfectly honest, until just recently I had a lot of mixed feelings about the images I had taken and I wasn’t sure I wanted to share many of these images publicly. There was a large part of me that feared that by taking and sharing these images I would become another person attempting to exploit the Zambian people, even if that truly wasn't my personal motive. However, after much contemplation, I finally came to the decision that I would share these images. I realized that keeping these images hidden on my hard drive and doing nothing with them would never serve any purpose or help any of the people that we set out to serve to begin with. Even if there was a small chance that 1 person's attention was grabbed because of these images and inversely 1 child could be helped because of it, then it would make all the difference.

Thanks, for listening. If you have any basic questions you can ask them in the comments below the post.

(One last thing. About half way through you’ll see some photos of an amazing looking hotel. To answer your question… no, we did not stay at this luxury hotel as nice as it would have been. We only stopped to watch the Sunset along the river one night and it just so happened to have zebras and giraffes walking around. No big deal. ;) In fact, many of us were lucky if we even got a shower each day. Most of the time we took buckets - a.k.a. we used our hands to scoop water onto our heads. #getbuckets Just a small part that makes for an unforgettable experience that I intend on doing all over again as soon as I'm able.)