Miami University

For over thirty years now, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have been living to defeat death. While the Dirty War of Argentina is today just a memory, the Mothers gather every week for “Jueves en la Plaza.” They walk for thirty minutes around the plaza in front of the Casa Rosada. The plaza today has become one of the only original plazas in the world where people still gather to get their voices heard; it’s the political center of Argentina. However, when the mothers started their weekly walk, it wasn’t this way.

We throw around phrases like: “It’s what’s on the inside that counts,” and “beauty is only skin deep,” and yet advertisements in virtually all magazines, television, and billboards use “beauty” as the most defining tool to sell. Whether marketing clothing, perfume, makeup, or cell phones: advertisers use the culturally accepted “attractive” to interest consumers in products—women with thin physiques and sex appeal.

The children and teenagers in this photograph are just a few of the thousands of Liberians who fled their civil war-riffed homeland for the United States in July 2003, when Liberia’s capital Monrovia was under siege by rebel forces. I took this photograph with my friend’s 35 mm camera earlier this year after 11:00 mass at St. Patrick’s Church. The parish of St. Patrick’s has undertaken assisting the assimilation of those Liberian refugees who wish to seek a new life in the United States rather than return home to Liberia.

The World Health Organization states “major depression is now the leading cause of disability globally and ranks fourth in the ten leading causes of the global burden of disease” (World Health Report, 2001). Developing countries, especially those burdened with disease and caught in violent conflict are the ones suffering the most. “Today, some 450 million people suffer from a mental or behavioral disorder, yet only a small minority of them receive even the most basic treatment” (World Health Report, 2001).

While marching in a gay pride parade in Paris, France, I took this picture of a few strangers who captured my heart. My participation in this event was part of my experience in the International Health Study Abroad program provided by the Department of Kinesiology and Health at Miami University. Look at the faces of these people. Could you look any of them in the eye and tell them that they do not deserve to be treated as human beings? Could you say that they do not deserve the same rights you enjoy?

Jacked-Up: The Problem of Anabolic Steroids in Football

It was a hot day in Rwanda. But not just any hot day. It was one of those hot days where you felt like the thick hot air was almost suffocating you. There was a kind of haziness in the air that made the day seem as if it were a dream, and not a day that actually took place. I looked around with fear at all the crying people as we huddled together in a Nyarubuye Catholic Church. I couldn’t move an inch, for about 2,000 other Tutsis surrounded me.

Introduction
How would you feel if someone stopped you on the street and demanded that you prove you are a citizen of the United States? How would you feel if that person was an officer of the law? How would you feel if you knew it had happened because of the way you look?

I took this photograph in Northern Ireland in summer 2007 during my Undergraduate Summer Scholars project. This homeless man was sitting outside of a grocery store, carrying all of his worldly possessions with him. He played a haunting song on his flute that people walking by pointedly ignored. Though no human stopped to help him, he had one friend—a loyal dog who loved him and kept him warm. I deliberately included the garbage can in this picture because in this moment I realized that both here and abroad, the homeless are often treated like trash.

On the surface this is just another cheap prayer card, such as you could find in churches and Christian shops around the world. But this particular card is more than that. It is one man’s cry for help and for me a life changing moment.