Dillon Bechthold

This place is amazing! It’s so beautiful. The people when you get to know them they are so fun and full of life. Just the other day we went to Walukuba and they put on a whole going away dance for one of the volunteers that’s going home and it was so cool. They even made some of us get in on the action. Like they made me play this huge gourd with a metal thing that you beat it with.
A couple days ago we took pikis(small motor bikes) up to Walukuba and walked all around there and Danneda just seeing the land where most of the Suubi women stay and just getting use to where and what and who we will be filming. It was a lot of fun by the end of the day we had about a hundred kids following us just wanting to be filmed or photographed or some just came up to hold our hands and walk with us. It was so cool…
This place just seems to be changing a lot about me. One is my artistic abilities have improved mainly because of Stevi for she is always challenging me without even saying anything. Just the work she is doing and her suggestions are amazing. My photography and even my drawing have improved greatly.
But as well as just my prospective of the world has changed like everything I had before this means nothing and everything I worked for is nothing. These tribes here work hard just so they have enough food for the day or they sacrifice food so they can send their children to school. Its crazy. I only really work hard and long so I can buy the stupidest things…
Anyways yesterday we went to an AIDS orphanage to just hang out and they ended up serving us lunch, which was rice and beans, and letting us take pictures and footage. But seeing these kids and life that they have and what they make of it was so unique because here they are with nothing and they have AIDS but yet they are running around and having fun and just living life as a kid does instead of what you see on the TV where they are just sad looking and sitting on a pile of trash or something. It’s not like that at all from what I’ve seen. Even in the villages where the children really do have nothing and their toys are medicine bottles tide to a string that they drag around have so much personality and life in them where like I said the TV makes them seem like they are living for nothing and they are so unhappy. But to be honest they don’t know what America or the rest of the world is like so they have fun with their medicine-bottle-pull-cars and running through the streets like wild animals. They do have lives and they are having fun and its not 100% bad here. At the same time by no means am I saying that they have an easy life because mostof them have had brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers die and some nights they might not have any food and a lot of them have AIDS, but there is this other side to them that us as foreigners never see because we only see the bad in this country and with us being here filming and photographing we are hoping to show you our readers and watchers and everyone else who will ever see this work will understand that there is so much more to Africa than is shown on the news or internet and mainly that there is hope of making this continent even better than they have it now. It seems that things can only get better because more and more people are learning and doing things to improve things here. It’s quite an exciting time…