New Life Children’s Home and a very special shoot!

I’m fortunate to see some pretty interesting things and meet some outstanding people as a photographer! I have a great attraction to people and their stories, because each is so unique and deserves telling. The photograph above is of Michelle. Michelle really drove home what I do for a living: help tell a story!

Michelle is an 18-month-old orphan from Guatemala. She traveled to Lubbock from New Life Children’s Home with Kendon and Wendy Wheeler, two spectacular people that have spent years in Guatemala directing the orphanage and educating and ministering to those they come in contact. Check out the New Life Children’s Home Web site if you are interested in more information about their work. Believe me when I say, we are all more fortunate than many, and this is a great cause and direction in life!

Back to Michelle. Michelle is a year and a half old, yet (and this is the kicker) he only weighs eight pounds. That’s right, wrap that around your head for a second. Eight pounds! The average weight for infants born in the United States is approximately seven pounds. Needless to say, Michelle is tiny. However, that’s the only “issue,” if you can even call it that, with Michelle. She was brought to Lubbock for genetic testing to determine, what doctors believe, what form of dwarfism she has. If I remember correctly, Michelle did not weigh over two pounds when she was born prematurely, and when Wendy said she was a survivor, it was a statement that goes a long way. She survived as a premature infant in hospital conditions not like our own in the U.S., and she is now an energetic 18-month-old that once getting started, is surprisingly, unstoppable!

To be honest, I was not expecting Michelle to be able to walk and be developed as she was when I first heard about her from the editor of the magazine we photographed her for. I was most definitely wrong about that. Michelle can walk, run, understand both English and Spanish, and she blows kisses! I was totally blown away by how special this little girl was! I’ll leave the magazine to finish out the details to why she was in Lubbock, but we did spend some time with her throughout the day, and everyone she met was just as affected as yours truly.

Being able to meet people like Michelle and Kendon and Wendy Wheeler is probably the greatest aspect of my job, and being able to help relay their stories to a greater audience is definitely the second! I hope you all check out their Web site and their work! It’s people like them that make this world a much better place, and we should all be proud of them for that!

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 20th, 2008 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Blog, Learning, News, People, Photography, Teachings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.