Rodgers took this photograph. My camera was slung around his neck, set to Manual after a crash course in the basics of exposure. Rodgers isn't a jerk--he's really very nice and funny--but he managed to get an image in the forty shots he took that is better than any of the thousands I took. So it goes.

I gave him the camera because we were making our way through one of the biggest slums in the world, and he would have a better vantage with which to take photos while Pete and I would capture video footage discreetly. What I mean to say is, while Pete and I were carefully walking around with white knuckles gripping our video cameras and hoping the picture wouldn't be too shaky for Kelly to edit later, Rodgers wouldn't be hassled with his camera, and he got to hold the body up to his face to compose each shot carefully. We bemoaned that we looked like Americans by the hour--it became one of our several mantras.

But I was saying about "one of the biggest slums in the world": we were astounded, and delighted, to see this entire society. Sans, of course, any running water or public services of any kind. No law enforcement, even if there was an understanding. No infrastructure of any kind actually--the closest sign of such that we could find was the rampant piggybacking on power lines for electricity and cable television. (Yep.) Shops were set up along the alleys selling food that we were enormously tempted by, bootleg DVDs and karaoke machine rentals, and school supplies. Day care programs, butchers, and hotels were set up around each "block" and, though thousands of people were "sharing" one toilet, people were surviving.

Still, while imagining what the day-to-day in such a place consists of, we had to wonder where you can go from a place like this.