Colorful Socks

Peering into the gloomy room, my eyes were drawn to the little stripes of color at the far end. What colorful socks! The ones with little toes on the ends, no less! My cheery heart began to sink though when I began to notice that the socks were clinging to feet and legs that hardly filled them in. I looked at the children that lay there, and they stared back, not at me, but at the ceiling. Instead of the childish mirth one would expect from the excited and curious eyes of kids faced with a camera, theirs were blank. At least, the expressions on their faces were foreign to me. I couldn't tell if they were happy or annoyed. They just lay there. In a screened-in room filled with laughter, crying and garbled sounds of children trying to communicate, four children stricken with cerebral palsy silently lay there, their heads supported by the special cradles that held their bodies, their legs and feet dangling too-large, colorful socks in a futile attempt to dress up their sedentary lives.

Nahirapan akong kunan sila ng litrato. One thing I love about my job is that I get to take photographs of different people--youth, children, mothers, fathers, board members, organizers, and the different personalities that color the development sphere. Children are special. They are visions of happy thoughts that enthrall you one moment, and then splat you with baby food or worse in the next. Their energy and camera-hungry-pogi-poses leave me staring out into black holes in the galactic cosmos at the end of the day, mind-numbed and tired. But you take delight at having partaken of their mirth, and will go back again and again to capture what can be shared. It is terribly wrong to see children this way. Instead of seeing wonder in their faces, you see unchanging expressions of expectant monotony. Instead of life and liveliness, you begin to see what each day is like for them--still and silent.