With the intention of creating more space in my external hard drive, to make room for the countless photos and videos I recently took in Ethiopia, I deleted my backup copy of everything I had on my computer, thinking it would be only temporarily.
Unfortunately, after a few days of using the Photoshop program to process the photos, the computer crashed. Faced with the crash, in order not to lose any information, I wanted to copy, one more time, all the documents in the computer to the external hard drive but I ran out of time because what was damaged was precisely the computer's hard drive.
The meaning
Disaster... I have lost everything... I have lost the breadth and depth of years of work; how could this have happened to me, who have been using computer since they became popular, and who have always been so careful to keep a backup copy and sometimes even two... I am lost, I thought... this is like dying, or worse, like having the Alzheimer's, losing my memory; many of the material that I had on my computer I need them here and now and in the future.
Digital and spiritual
It was in 1989, when I arrived in Ethiopia, that I met my American friend, the late Father George Cotter, of happy memory. He was doing research in the field of cultural anthropology and collecting Ethiopian proverbs. The collection of these proverbs was stored on a small laptop, with green monochrome screen, with less than one megabyte of memory and a 20-megabyte hard drive.
To avoid carrying around trunks full of books, as many missionaries do, I left all the books behind in Portugal, and only took a cabinet file with thousands of data sheets to Ethiopia, which was the way, in those days, of storing information in an orderly manner.
When I saw George’s little machine, I thought it would be the solution to my problem. As a missionary, I have already traveled a lot, I have never been in the same place for more than 3 or 4 years, since I was 10 years old, and I still have a lot of traveling to do. The computer allowed me to carry the house on my back like a snail; much lighter than carrying books.
It was then that the philosophy of going digital began to emerge in me. Since I am here today and gone tomorrow, I can only take with me the essentials; and everything that is valuable to me can be digitized. If we think about it, digital is synonymous with spiritual; both are immaterial and intangible realities that need an increasingly small material substrate in order to exist and subsist. Today, if we printed all the information contained on a small external disk, we could fill a house with books, music records, photo albums and large wheels of films. I don't know if it would be possible to "print", or somehow to materialize the mind and the spirit contained in our brains...
The magnitude of the loss
Everything I currently own is digital and on my computer: my diary; the books I need and cherish, I digitized them and put them there, it was a colossal job over many years; my sermons; published articles and those yet to be published; in pure text alone I had 8 gigabytes, more than 3000 documents.
All very well organized by themes and folders: PowerPoints that I made on countless themes; lectures; formative meetings; retreats; my favourite music, some I already bought digitally, others I scanned myself; photos of places I have been and the activities I have done there: Spain, Ethiopia, Canada, England, the United States and Portugal, which took me weeks to scan from old slides or negatives; there were more than 12,000 all catalogued by theme, place and year; and finally, about 100 message films, many of which I bought on CD and transferred to the drive for convenience. A total of 120 gigabytes of information, which in a moment evaporated into nothing...
"I did not lose only what I’d given away"
After two nights of poor sleep and bad dreams, I started to think that some of the documents were in emails; others I would have given to friends and people who had asked me for them. In particular, a folder called slideshows came to mind, where I had put the work of one summer.
I digitized the old slideshows, made up of slides synchronized with a cassette soundtrack. They were fabulous slideshows with many stories and messages that no one had remembered to turn into PowerPoint. I digitized the sound and image, and manually synchronized the two; it was a job that took the entire summer and resulted in a folder of some 15 slides. As I realized that it would be valuable material, I later gave a copy to a catechist, along with many books on psychology and spirituality.
"For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it." (Matthew 16:25). Here is proof of how the digital and the spiritual are similar and that the gospel is the truth and the way to follow, in all the realities and situations of human life.
Everything I gave away from my digital work has not been lost; everything I kept for myself has been lost. While it is true that we can only give what we have, it is also true that we only have what we give. Let us be reminded here of the parable of the talents: those who did not "give", who did not make their talent pay, lost it; those who "gave", that is, put themselves at risk of losing their talents by trading with them, had a good profit.
If for some years, a footballer, a singer or a painter cease practicing his art, that is, “giving” it, or putting it at the service of the community, after a while he will lose his talent for that same art and craft; because by not giving, he lost it...
A happy ending...
I was thinking of contacting the people I gave my files to in order to recover some of them, when the computer technician called me to let me know that, after three days of working on the damaged drive, he was able to recover all but three videos of Ethiopia made recently. Thank you, God...
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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