Who am I, what do I do, what have I done, and why do I do it?  My Norwegian side says  “Uff-Da” What a question!

This road began many years ago when my wife and I joined a startup Presbyterian Church called Celebration Pres. Church.  On the last of the new members meetings, we were asked what we would do for the church if money were no object.  As the answers were given around the room, a lot of “I suppose” and “I guess I would” were given.  When it came to my turn, I said, “Hands down, written in stone, I would photograph the missions field.”

Two weeks later, the minister came to me with a Monday morning update from the Presbyterian Church with an announcement that they were looking for people to photograph the missions field.  I laughed and cried at the same time.

After a year and a half of planning with MBF, I found myself in Kenya and Cameroon for a total of 3 weeks.  We visited the primary state hospital, Kenyatta.  In addition, we went to the MBF hospitals of Kikuyu, TumuTumu, and Chogoria.  We also visited several local churches and the refugee slum areas. 

You could feel the heart in these hospitals - "God lives here".  People came from miles just to get to to them by the morning exams.  Miles isn't an adequate phrase.  People left at midnight and walked all night to get to these hospitals and their out-laying clinics.  The amount of people coming in necessitated concentric rings of outer clinics to take the pressure off of the main hospital.

Jitegemea was a Swahili word that was everywhere.  It didn't have a literal translation.  Jitegemea is like the first steps that a child takes on its own, not needing to be held up anymore, yet watched over with caring eyes.  Chorgotia hospital, for example, was trying to be extremely self-sufficient in this way.  They had their own cattle, large gardens, and groves of trees for wood.

After a week in Kenya, I took off for an additional week in Cameroon.   No one with MBF went with me as my scheduled traveling companion had stepped, barefoot, in some unsanitary mud in Haiti.  (This resulted in his blood pressure, heart rate and temperature all hovering around the same numbers.)  Traveling with God, I would say I didn’t travel alone.

  Cameroon is a French/English speaking country and I am an English/German (sort of) speaking person.  However, I was once told that if you can say please, thank-you, and excuse me in a tongue and were genuinely friendly, you could go far. 

  At the airport, I found out that my hosts were not certain whether I was coming or not, so no one was there to greet me!  So, now they would be there, soon.  Now, this was the night that Cameroon was scheduled to be in their World Cup Soccer match.  The last thing anyone there wanted to do was wait for this guy to see if he had a ride or not!  It seemed that someone was checking their watch every five minutes to see if I had a ride yet because they wanted to get to a TV and watch the upcoming game.  It appeared that I would be closing down the airport!  Happily, my ride, ambulance, arrived as the floors were being mopped and the airport shut down,  and I went to D’Joungolo Hospital’s guesthouse.

I should point out that in the last paragraph, I said that my ride would be there soon.  There is what is called affectionately, “Africa Time”. This means that if a person says he will see you tomorrow, it could be from sunrise to sunset; see you at 3:00 means between 3 and 4 – or so.  We had to be very exact with our Kenyan driver as to just exactly when we needed to leave. Cameroon has expanded upon this idea.  As an example, My Cameroon Air flight was to leave at 2:00 P.M.  We finally left about 7:30.  So, I guess that I should have understood a “we will be there soon” as “sometime, just before the airport doors close”.

I was fascinated by Cameroon.  The overwhelming feeling that I got was  look at what they do with what they have.  I saw hospitals with only one microscope, which had to be shared, water pumped from a cistern to a rooftop water tower, hand cranked centrifuge, rusty, soldered dentist instruments, and many 110 volt instruments that had to be converted to be used.  Yet they went so far with what little they had. 

  To become a nurse at one of the hospitals, I was told that the prospect was kept at the hospital for a month to see if the want was genuine.  Then they would be sent off to the Catholic school to learn medicine and brought back to the hospital to learn to be a nurse.  “Being a nurse” wasn’t about just medicine, it was the Christian compassion found in each hospital.  Not just in the local area, but the region and for miles around, people knew that these hospitals had something special; God lived here.

God knows that I would go back to Cameroon or Kenya in a heartbeat!

Upon returning, I found I had about 2000 images and about 2 and a half hours of video.  These were forwarded to MBF on two different occasions. 

Since this trip for MBF, I have gone to Honduras and Belize twice. 

. .

I created God’s World Photography as a 501-C3 non-profit corporation to enable donations to be given directly to me, thus avoiding any further church entanglements since after the African trip, I came back to mixed reviews.  I was requested to go on the first Honduras trip and upon approaching the church for prayer/monetary support and help, I was told basically “no”.  It was felt that we, my family, weren’t wealthy enough for me to be taking these trips.  Further, if a donation was made to the church for me, would that make me an “employee” of the church or not.  This resulted in the church not wanting to talk of my expenses at all. The church didn’t feel that it was right and as such there would also be no send off or church-sanctioned blessing. 

I continued to travel and photograph, however, as I knew what God had put in my heart to do!

Let me tell you of the name God’s World Photography. 

We go back to the dark ages, years ago, when I was in college (my kids ask if writing had been invented yet – nice kids!)  On a photo project involving mirror images, I had taken a gargoyle downspout and mirrored it to create 3 eyes and 2 snouts.  It didn’t work.  No matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t get the layout correct.  “Hmm, God must not want me to print this as ugly as it is.”  Finally, it came together and I went to mount it.  After cutting the matte, I lifted the matte only to discover that the photo was directly under it and I had also cut an “X” through the middle of the image.  

OK, God doesn’t want me to print this! 

At about the same time, a story was going through the photo students that a photo show, images of “dog piles”, was going on in a major museum “back east”.  Nice work if you can get it, but really . . .dog piles.  

These two events inspired me to only photograph God’s world.

    When doctors, nurses, builders, and others are sent into the missions field, they are too busy doing what they were sent there to.  Photography is least on their minds except to grab a quick shot.  I have heard of one missions organization that sent out 20 or so disposable cameras to various locations to hopefully get a few good shots to use.

  That is the basis of God’s World Photography: to help mission organizations get back images of their projects and environments; to give them the ability to better tell their stories with photographs.