Ugandan Cameraman

First I want to say that I’ve been remiss in acknowledging that all the videos from yesterday’s post were taken by Morgan, as have been about half of the photos on the blog so far. Morgan has, in fact, made many pictures of me in the first week of this journey, yet the title of this blog entry does not refer to him. While as a tandem, we might rival just about any other camera-wielding duo in the country, at least in terms of quantity of shots, we were both humbled by one of our encounters yesterday.

Yesterday, Morgan and I spent a rather sublime day just walking around central Kampala, meeting people, having interesting conversations, buying a few things that we didn’t need, and taking some pictures. At one place, we stopped to talk to some boda boda drivers, who were themselves delightful, and one of them upon learning that we were photographers, ran over to find a real life Ugandan “cameraman” for us to meet. Kavuma Johnson was very handsomely dressed in a dark suit, offering up his services for weddings, graduations, birthday parties, and portraits to the Valentine’s Day revelers. Around his neck hung a twenty year old Canon AE-1, and as we took some pictures together, he mentioned that he’s been trying to get into digital photography.

Now I’ve never been one to fully embrace the generosity tenets of Karma Kitchen, where I’ve been volunteering once a month for over a year, and I’ve certainly not been as generous as I could have been thus far on this trip, but when I heard “digital photography”, it was as if Nipun and company from Karma Kitchen were the ones whispering it in my ear. Quickly I ran back to the nearby hotel and grabbed one of the many point and shoot cameras donated for this trip, this one an early digital model, and brought it to Kavuma. He was so flabbergasted. He asked “this is for me?” and then promised to pray for us (I get prayed for a lot here, mostly because I am Jewish—clearly in the wrong camp as far as many Ugandans are concerned) as he tried out his new camera, courtesy of either Skater and Liz in Tucson, or one of the teachers at the College Preparatory School in Oakland. Your camera has gone to a good home, even if it didn’t make it all the way to the resettlement camp in the north (we still have 27 cameras for that purpose, and I’ll write about that project in a future entry), and Kavuma was so thankful that within a few hours, he was at the front desk of the hotel, delivering 4x6 glossies of the three of us with our cameras, that he had printed from his new camera. There were many other lovely things that happened yesterday, and others that are sure to happen today and in the upcoming days, but this one will stick with me for a while.