here is a place about 20 kilometers down the Rio Dulce where the water begins to mix with the Caribbean Sea and the jungle drapes the river banks. It's the epitome of "remote" and upon arrival I knew I had landed in something perfectly unexpected. My digital camera had suffered heat-stroke in the jungles of Tikal and I was left with only my 35mm film and some Polaroid. It was appropriate, considering the setting was as organic as it gets.

A precocious little girl asked me what I was doing; I told her I was there to photograph her. Somehow she had the ability to blur excitement and disappointment into one look on her face.

"We never get to see the pictures," she told me. At that moment I pulled out my Polaroid camera and photographed her unique expression. When I handed her the Polaroid, her facial expression changed once more, this time to pure disgust.

"What is this!? There is nothing on this thing!" She was about to give up on me and tell her friends I was a complete fraud until the photograph began to develop. The range of this child's expressions was like riding a ferris wheel, up and down, and around again. When we had circled the wheel of feelings and ended with a high pitch scream of confusion and thrill, I knew I had won a new friend.

My experience at the orphanage Casa Guatemala was wrapped up in no more than 8 hours. We swam through the reeds and jumped off the dock. We played checkers with bottle caps. We walked down trails and spotted scorpions. We drank soda, ate watermelon and bared the unbearable heat. At the end of the day I was drifting out into the Rio Dulce on a motorboat reluctantly waving goodbye. I was enraptured with the lives of these children. Everything about their strength, curiosity, and their complex state of (im)maturity was embedded in them because of the circumstances that had brought them to Casa Guatemala.