so, i'm not sure if any of you have ever seen this photo before, but i saw it for the first time tonight. if you haven't seen it, this was taken by a guy named kevin carter during the famine in sudan in 1993. it won the pulitzer prize in 1994. it's a picture of a little girl, completely emaciated from hunger, crawling to the u.n. food center, which is about 1 km away. and yes, that is a vulture following her. now, the story i heard tonight was that he waited 3 hrs to get the right shot (waiting for the vulture to open its wings) and when it didn't happen, he just took the pictures he had and left. just left. didn't do anything. just walked away. and then a few months later, he committed suicide. he was blasted by the journalistic community (and a lot of other people, i'm sure) for not getting involved in this little girl's life beyond taking the picture. no one really knows what happened to the girl, and this picture has become one that is used to show the horrors of famine and poverty in africa.
when i got home, i looked it up online and found a couple of different versions of the story -- he only waited 20 minutes, he chased the vulture away, the vulture flew away eventually, the little girl made it to the food center, he sat under a tree smoking and crying for awhile after it happened, the suicide was the result of a bunch of different things in his life, the suicide was because of guilt, he was told not to interfere because of disease, etc.
no matter what the real story is -- and i'm not sure we'll ever really know -- it's horrific. to wait, any length of time, to watch something this devastating occur and then do no thing about it, especially when it's in your power to do something in that moment, even to make it better for one person, to make a difference in one life, is absolutely disgusting.
the caption above the picture when i saw it said "putting down the camera and getting my hands in the game." it's hard, when we see pictures like the one above, not to want to do something. in the face of such suffering. we often wonder how it is that we can't respond with some action.
but what i think we often miss is the things that are right here, in our towns, in our cities, in our neighborhoods.
what is staring us in the face right now where we're the ones in kevin carter's situation -- behind the camera, watching the horror, yet not getting involved? where we have the opportunity to make something better, to make a difference, to change someone's world (and, most likely, to change our own in the process), but we're standing on the sidelines, observing? or maybe it's that there's something we're seeing all around us, that we experience on a daily basis in the world around us, that God's calling us to do something about, but for whatever reason, we're still holding the camera up, not getting our hands in the game.
where are we standing behind the camera? where are you?
where am i not putting the camera down and getting in the game in which God's calling me to be involved?
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