One of Those Days, Pt. III - The Conclusion

This is the conclusion to One of those days parts 1 and 2. Read those first if you haven't already.
I wrote this on the night of Monday October 16:


I then showed everyone the tear in the screen and they too were convinced what had happened. The proprieter of the hotel gave us the runaround (the first thing I noticed when entering the room to drop off my stuff the day before was the sign which reads "La empresa no se hace responsible de objetos perdidos". You have one guess what that means. The people at the hotel had left the back window open (accidentally), making it possible for someone to come in and take my wallet (Drivers license, Sin card, health card, Visa, US$180.00, and others) and my black CD case along with my backups of the first three days of shooting. I now had a laptop with photos on it that were not backed up. That meant that if the laptop crashed (or say, was stolen), my work from the first three days would be toast. This is a scary thing for a photographer on the field.

My first order of business was getting these photos backed up on some sort of media. Robert only had a handful of CD's (not nearly enough for the 12 gigabytes I had accumulated so far). Tacuba doesn’t have anywhere to purchase DVD's. We decided to drive (based on information from the proprieter woman) 40 minutes to a town. We found the supermarket she was talking about, but they didn't carry DVD's. Time well wasted.

So here I am, 11:00pm, typing out this little entry. I'm backing up all I can on Robert's CD's and we'll head into that same town tomorrow when the stores are open. Unfortunately, we have four stories to cover tomorrow, which means a long, long day as it is. So tomorrow night I get to stay up and backup 5 discs worth of material (at about 40 minutes per disc to burn).

What surprises me as I sit here writing this, is how I feel about the whole situation. I've never been robbed before. Not only am I thankful that nothing else was taken (that is a major blessing to be sure), but I can't get bummed about this, even a little. If anything, it has made the day pretty exciting.

Most of all though, I feel like the luckiest guy in the world to even be here in the first place. Today we visited a family affected by HIV. The children are beautiful and I completely forgot about my own miniscule problems during the 3 hours we spent talking with them and playing with their kids (for me playing = taking photos). This afternoon, the stars aligned and I had some of the best shooting/lighting conditions so far on the trip, which got me so pumped. Plus, I talked with Julie, and she got a full time job for three months!

Being here has been so incredible. I absolutely love this work. It is difficult, and stressful, but it is the most rewarding work imaginable.

Tomorrow morning I am going to look out behind our little building and see whoever did this just took the cash and tossed the wallet. That would be sweet. Goodnight.

UPDATE:

Last week I heard from Febe who told me that the wallet had been dumped in front of the hotel, sans cash. I've already replaced just about everything, but at least it was returned and I don't have to stress out about identity theft.