I was thinking through how little I know about these children when I take their initial profile picture here at CURE Zambia. For the most part, I don’t know their hopes, fears, dreams, and aspirations. I don’t know what they’ve been through or all that much about their life. There is a lot you can gather from a first impression, but there is so much more that you cannot. Dwelling on this eventually led me to playing with the photography technique of double exposures as an attempt to illustrate these feelings.

But this is my job, to get to know these children. To sit down and ask them what their dreams are, sometimes for the first time in their life. What do they hope for? What are they afraid of? What makes them happy? What makes them sad? And it is through getting to know these children that I have seen Christ.

I have much to learn from these little ones.

Here’s a little 3D flickergraph from the OR today.

Praise is the patient going under anesthesia in the photo. He’s an extremely smiley 9 year old boy who’s come to us here at CURE Zambia all the way from Zimbabwe! He had surgery to treat his hydrocephalus and is recovering in the ward now. If you so like, you can follow his time with us here.

If you’re more interested in the flickergraph (or 3D photograph – I think I might be the only person that calls them flickergraphs). It is just an animated GIF made from two, slightly displaced photos to give the perception of depth. It’s similar to the way our eyes work. We see depth because our two eyes are slightly displaced, giving us two slightly different images. Our brain then combines these two images and can, rather accurately, perceive distances and depth.