Outside the Lens

Many of you have been following my adventure in Cambodia since the very beginning.
In my first post, I explained that I did not want my readers to have the expectation that they were going to see pictures of the work I am doing.
Here at She Rescue, we are very careful not to take any pictures of the home or of the girls we care for. We are not even able to take our cameras or phones inside the home. This is for two reasons.
1) In Cambodia, it is illegal to post the face of a girl that has been trafficked to the internet.
2) We are protecting the identities of our girls. We do not want to risk any former pimps or customers trying to find our girls. This is because we are trying to keep them physically safe, and we want to ensure a safe environment for them to heal and have a hope in Christ for the future.
I knew coming into this that I would not get to share pictures of the 23 precious faces I have been working with, so this didn't come as a shock or disappointment to me.
The difficult part about this is not being able to share their faces with you. I want to be able to come home and show my friends and family the faces of my new little sisters, but the only thing that I have is my words. I want to be able to remember the faces of these little ones when I leave, but I won't have that picture to hang on my wall in my dorm room and remember. When I come home, I'll have pictures of places I've been, things I've seen, and people I've never met...but I won't be able to show people the very reason I came to Cambodia.
Even though these things are a little bit of a downside, I have learned a valuable lesson from these rules. I have learned to see experiences in life in a new light.
Most people are so excited to go to a third world country on a missions trip, take a picture with a cute foreign kid, come back home, make it their profile picture, and then continue to live life. People live life to take a picture, post it on Facebook, see how many "likes" they can get, and then move onto the next picture-taking opportunity.
Don't get me wrong; I love pictures! I love being able to capture memories, but the mindset of today's technology filled world is that the picture IS the memory!
At She Rescue, I have learned that the moment is precious in and of itself! I look at things now with the intention of storing it away in my memory forever...because the moment itself is the memory--not the picture. I've learned to live life outside the lens...to take advantage of the moment before I reach for my camera and miss it.