Allie and Tim, who live in Cambridge, serve as directors for the orphanage. I had photographed their wedding years ago at the Newagen Seaside Inn in the Boothbay Region of Maine.

Allie and Tim have traveled extensively since getting married, and as part of those travels spent several months in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia volunteering at an orphanage. There they became fast friends with social worker Abebe Fantahun, who felt a specific commitment to children with HIV. Abebe dreamed of returning to his hometown, M

ekele, in northern Ethiopia to open an orphanage that would accept HIV infected children and their siblings, as most orphanages would not accept HIV kids. Allie and Tim encouraged Abebe to pursue his dream.

Fast-forward to 2010 when Abebe has just returned to Mekele to open his orphanage (which he named Lola) and Allie and Tim had committed to raise funds in the US to help run the orphanage. Allie and Tim set a fundraiser at her family’s home in Portland and invited me.

When Allie and Tim began speaking about Lola it was clear they had a very deep passion for Lola and its mission in northern Ethiopia. What they didn’t have, ahem, was a whole lot of pictures to illustrate the wonderful things that Lola was doing. Sold by their passion for the project and flush with frequent flyer points, I offered to take photos if they would let me tag along on their next trip to Lola. And they took me up on it.

So, this past spring on this unforgettable trip I got to meet Abebe and other Lola staff and of course the Lola kids, and to appreciate firsthand why Allie and Tim are so committed to this project. We also got to help Lola celebrate its first birthday.

Lola Children’s Fund’s mission is to raise money to provide housing, medical and educational services for HIV-affected orphans and local children in Ethiopia.

Ethiopia has nearly 5.5 million orphans, with more than 800,000 orphaned by AIDS. About 80,000 Ethiopian children are infected with HIV. In 2010, 14,000 kids were infected and 3,500 died. More than 20,000 children need anti-retroviral medications to survive.

Lola was founded because Mekele had no services available for HIV-positive orphans, many of whom are left without family or government support after their parents’ deaths. Most orphanages will not take HIV children, so only the non-HIV children will be taken in. Many children live on the streets, receiving no food, shelter, education or medicine to help them combat the disease. Lola, on the other hand, will open its doors to the HIV infected children and their siblings so the siblings can be kept together after their parents’ deaths.

I have no idea how it happened; I simply fired up the Mac this morning, and my to-do list was nowhere to be found. And my trash can was as empty as can be. Can you say “rapidly sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach”? I can.

I searched for “to-do” hoping maybe I had inadvertently slipped it inside a folder. The search came back nothing found. Twice.

Taking a deep breath I fired up Retrospect Express, my back-up application, and went through the steps to recover the last saved copy of my to-do list. Thankfully, it was right where it was supposed to be. Stomach starting to feel better already, breathing returning to normal.

Okay, now that the to-do list is recovered, here comes the rant:  Backing up your computer and any data on external hard drives on a regular basis is incredibly important, and it’s not just important for businesses like mine. Anyone not backing up regularly risks total loss of all sorts of important files.

Keeping up with your finances on Quicken? Have a couple of hundred (or thousand) songs on iTunes? Maintaining your Christmas card list electronically? Can you really afford to lose it all to a lightning strike?  A hardware crash? Or just an unexplained dumb mistake like mine?

Know what the experts say about all computers and external hard drives?  It’s not a matter of if they will crash, but instead when they will crash. Not to mention a house fire or other disaster.

My heart went out to a mother who recently related her bad fortune:  she lost all the digital photos of her only child, a five-year-old, when her computer bit the dust. She has nothing left but a couple of prints. Everything else is gone.

Yes, there are companies that often are able to recover files from crashed computers, but their file recovery services come with a hefty price tag, often over a thousand dollars. And, they can’t always recover everything.

Why risk being in this dreadful position when it’s so easy to back up?

Many professional photographers use a backup strategy we shorthand as “3-2-1.”  That stands for three copies of every file, using at least two kinds of media, with at least one copy off site at all times.  Our two kinds of  media are external hard drives and DVDs.  One hard drive is always off site, and many of our DVDs are also off site.

Keeping current is easy if you set the backup to run on its own. We do this using Retrospect Express.

We have two sets of external hard drives. Set A is on site for one week and it is updated daily, while Set B is safe off site. On week two we swap the sets, bring Set B up to date, then Set B gets daily updates. At the end of week two the routine starts over again. This way we should never lose more than a day’s work due to a hardware or operator error. If we have a disaster such as a fire which destroys the on-site back up, we shouldn’t lose more than a week’s worth of work.

We started using Retrospect for regular back-ups years ago thanks to the advice of Brian at Rainstorm Consulting, but if you are on a Mac using the latest OS, you’ll get Apple’s Time Machine backup app for free.  Not being a PC user, I don’t know the options there, but there appear to be many choices.

There are also companies that allow you to upload your files over the Internet, and they store the files on their servers. That’s even easier than buying sets of hard drives and toting them back and forth. And, if you update daily that way, you’ll never lose more than a day’s work. The friendly folks at BEK Inc in Brunswick offer this service. And you don’t have to be in Brunswick to use them, you simply need an Internet connection anywhere in the world.  Or, if you do live nearby they can come to your home or place of business and get you started with a routine like mine using a software solution and portable hard drives.

Last, if you have just a few items to back up (your address book, an important pdf), you get up to 2 GB of online storage free at Mozy.com

Okay, end of rant.  Now maybe I should actually start chipping away at the to-do list?

Though I grew up on the Alabama Gulf Coast, and visited Mississippi numerous times after Hurricane Camille struck there in 1969, I still wasn’t prepared for how widespread and intense Katrina’s destruction would be.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’ll repeat what so many others have said: it’s difficult to appreciate how complete the devastation was until you see it in person. Pictures in magazines and newspapers and reports on the television news just don’t prepare you for mile after mile of houses rendered uninhabitable by the August 29th storm and the subsequent levee breaks which sent storm waters rushing throughout the New Orleans suburbs.

I spent several days with a group from Bowdoin College in Brunswick that traveled down to work as volunteers in a free soup kitchen located in St. Bernard Parish. While there I was able to drive around and photograph some of the worst devastation in the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish.

When we entered into an area of heavy devastation (adjacent to one of the levee breaks) the first thing that caught our eyes were four houses slammed into one another. Overhead dangled traffic signals that were still inoperable nine months after the storm.

Unfortunately, things didn’t get that much better as we proceeded. Driving a few blocks to the left we saw empty lots littered with vehicles, broken wood, and mostly-unidentifible dirty-brown debris.

There was a giant tree trunk sitting on top of a car, a car on top of another car, and a sofa dangling precariously off a pick-up truck turned on its side.

A truck was rammed up against a set of concrete house steps, the only sign of the residence that one stood there. Another house had been shoved off its foundation and stuck out into the street.

As we progressed to streets where homes were still standing, I imagined this must be what a war zone looks like: gutted ruins of houses with no sign of life. A vandal with a can of spray paint apparently agreed.

Homes that were still standing were most likely stripped of all their contents, either by vandals or by their former residents eager to salvage any relics they could find of their pre-Katrina lives.

And, it was not only homes that stood vacant. At least ninety-five percent of the structures we saw appeared to still be in ruins: fast-food restaurants,entire shopping centers,churches,doctor’s offices, banks, the library, fire stations, schools, the post office, government offices. Katrina got them all.

Wherever we drove (for miles and miles) in St. Bernard Parish it was desolate, damaged and depressing.

The handful of businesses that had re-opened stood out. The Home Depot had a full parking lot. We stopped at a Walgreens drug store with a “NOW OPEN” sign, and patrons were lined up at the two cash registers. At the Murphy Oil filling station on the main drag, one of the few filling stations we noticed open, there was a car at every pump.

It’s difficult to even imagine being a resident of St. Bernard Parish today. I know that I would have given up and fled to a new home had I lived in St. Bernard Parish pre-Katrina. I would not have the heart to go back and face the struggles that are there now.

The new norm is FEMA trailer parks everywhere. On the parking lot of the Dominoe Sugar refinery, in grassy fields adjacent the main drag, flanking the pond in the public park behind the parish government center, there are rows and rows of identical white trailers.

 And the FEMA trailers are not house “single-wide” trailers, but instead tiny travel trailers. Many of the trailers we saw had only one window per side. Surely, it must be like living in a tin can.

As the new hurricane season opens today, we can’t allow ourselves to forget the victims of Katrina. These people, in New Orleans and along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, have years, maybe even decades of uphill struggle ahead of them trying to rebuild some semblance of a life. They need our continued prayers and support.

Last Saturday, a darling black lab was roaming at large in our neighborhood. He was friendly, well cared for, and neutered–obviously someone’s beloved pet–but no one recognized him and he had lost his collar, so we had no way to get him to his home. Brunswick’s animal control office was closed until the following Tuesday, so it looked like this dog might be separated from his owner for at least three days.

We live only one block off busy Maine Street, so if the dog stayed at large, there was the chance he might get hit on Maine Street, so Gail next door grabbed him and put him in her fence until she was able to track down his owner.

The story had a happy ending: the dog was reunited with his owners later that day–a family that had just moved into the neighborhood. Someone had left the fence open by mistake. But, the incident got me moving quickly on an idea I’d toyed with for a while, getting my own Scout (photo below) microchipped.

Scout had an appointment that Tuesday for his yearly shots, and when I asked the vet about microchipping, I was surprised at how easy and inexpensive the process is. The microchip, about the size of a grain of rice, is implanted without putting the dog to sleep. The vet uses a syringe to place the chip under the dog’s skin near his shoulder blades. And, the total cost was under $60 including registering the chip’s ID number with Home Again, which maintains the database of ID numbers and a 24-hour hot line for reuniting pets with their owners.

Now if Scout slips out of the house–he has once in the past year–or if he slips his collar while on a walk–he has once in the past year–we have the chip as an extra precaution against losing him.