This year we decided to pull together a photo room to use for a variety of purposes for services to our clients. One way we are using it is to take product photos of the crafts and handmade items that our clients make to help them build their online sales site. Our assistance with our community entrepreneurs has been a wonderful blessing and we are hopeful to continue to help many families forward.

I walked in a home once and saw several small photos with a large African family with one single different white person in each photo on her wall. I would ask who the person was and they would say, we don’t know. We just wanted the photo of our family and it’s all we had so we put that on the wall. I wrote a blog about this incident years ago, when I first began the Asha’s Refuge ministry. You can search archives in the blog some time in the summer likely of 2009 for this post. I believe it’s titled, “I will never be just another photo on your wall.” My heart felt terrible that so many passerby’s would stop in to see needy refugee families only to do a days service project, take a photo, and leave the family. This seems to happen a lot around the holidays. This particular family I wrote about has been one I’ve stayed connected to now for over ten years. I’ve watched all the children grow and the family work hard to go to school, learn to drive, gain good jobs, organize community gardens, buy a first home, serve their community, volunteer at church, go through sicknesses and challenges, grow closer to Jesus, start their own side businesses, have more babies and grandchildren and so much more. I am truly blessed to call this family my forever friends. Now, I may want a photo with them one day and it will be because they truly are my friends and I want to treasure my experiences in life with them. It won’t be to show off a days good deed to post on social media. I truly care about this family in my heart.

Another way we are using the photo booth/room is to capture memories for our families. We’ve always known our families have had a desire to have a photo of their entire family, their children or themselves as a couple and have had a heart to help them make this happen. So often people who serve our clients will take a photo of themselves with the family and give the family that snap shot with their own photo in the photo of their family. This is okay sometimes, but most of the time the person hasn’t stayed connected to the family and just did a one time visit or service project and our family never sees them again. Often, our clients don’t even know who they were. They just remember it was someone who came by and wanted a photo with the family then gave them this photo.

With this, we decided to offer an opportunity for our clients to bring their family in for a photo shoot. We charged $20 for the photography session and will gift each family that chose to participate with at least an 8×10 printed portrait for Christmas this year. We’ve turned this into a fundraiser so that clients that would like to give back to this project and are able to (many we have worked with for years, have resettled well, have great jobs and are more stable) can. We will send a link for families to view all of their photos and choose to order more photos that they like at a reasonable cost. Their investment in this project is something they seem happy to do!

Our first photo week, the week before Thanksgiving, was pretty busy. We know there are still some families trying to pull all their members together to come in and get their photo taken. We have done this by appointment only to keep the numbers in our building low. It’s been fun to see the various faces, smiles and poses that our talented photographer, Erick Ramos, has been able to capture. The children are so fun and photogenic. We can’t wait to share the finished photos with our families and are eager to also share some of these with our supporters. If you would like to give to help us with this project, this would be super helpful! Our backdrops were about $85 each, then the lense rental, the staff time taking the photos and doing the editing/uploading and finally, our purchasing of all the larger family gift photos. The total project may cost about $800-$1000. We may also choose to blow some photos up for our new office building so clients will feel welcome and more at home when they visit us and see their community faces. If you would like to support this Christmas Photo Project and our Business Photo Booth, please give today at ashasrefuge.org, just click to donate.