The 33rd Hour

We are 33 hours into our trip home from Uganda. Pavel and I have touched down in Minneapolis for one last layover - our sixth city since we left Kampala yesterday. Shawn is somewhere in the sky en route to Los Angeles, and Denver still seems impossibly far away. The snow outside this plane window is fake, staged for dramatic impact. In a moment I'll wake up, and Kenny will be cutting a pineapple. Edith will be poaching eggs, and Joan and Esther will peel carrots and shred cabbage. We'll gather in the kitchen to pray, and Mary will say "Friends, humble yourselves...."

Upcoming LA Show - Art & Gratitude

I'm proud to be involved with an exciting evening featuring art and performances to benefit UgandaProject (UP), an organization that is very dear to my heart. UP provides free education, housing, mentoring, and basic needs to students who have been orphaned, many due to the AIDS epidemic. I first traveled to the village of Ndejje outside of Kampala in May of 2010, and I am thrilled to be returning this coming January to continue building friendships with the students I met there a year and a half ago. This art show in Los Angeles will hopefully help raise the necessary funds to keep our students in school and well cared for. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to share our students' stories with the LA community: with a performance by Broadway star Shoshana Bean and sponsored by actress Abigail Spencer, it promises to be a star-studded evening!

Dylan's Down with the Arts Photo Workshop

Earlier in the summer I was fortunate to score a great gig combining two of my favorite interests - photography, and working with children with special needs. Leslie and Stephen Secrist, parents of the incomparable Dylan and founders of the fledgling organization Dylan's Down with the Arts, invited me to lead a photography workshop for children with special needs and their typical peers. DDWA is a super cool organization, unique in that they educate people with special needs and help prepare them for careers in the arts.

The participants and I met on a Saturday morning at Belleview Park in Englewood, and for this first workshop we kept our goals simple. We focused on three types of photography: landscape, macro, and portrait. It was a blast, and I'm looking forward to our next workshop this fall!

Examples of landscape photography

Examples of macro photography

Examples of portrait photography

The whole gang!