“Looking much older than his twelve years, Kannan carries the weight of the world on his shoulders since the death of his parents. He tirelessly works from before dawn until late in the night to support himself and finish his schooling. When he can not work a moment longer he escapes to the hills near his village in Tamil Nadu, India. I took this photo when he showed me the beauty of his secret place while I was teaching at a school for at-risk children during the 2008-2009 school year.”

-Rebecca Epperly

“This is my boyfriend and me near the London Arch in Victoria, Australia this past summer. I live in Ohio and he lives in Utah, but we were able to make it work and meet up in Melbourne!”

-Rachel Brown

“In October 2013, I was privileged to travel to Singapore to participate in an Expert Panel on Building Capacity for FamilyMatters!, a program of the Ministry of Social and Family Development in Singapore. The government of Singapore invested $40 million over three years to cultivate a pro-family environment. FamilyMatters! is an initiative to enhance relationship skills, marriage preparation, and work-life harmony. The Expert Panel assisted in the development of a foundational certificate in family life education. I am pictured here with other members of the Expert Panel. It was an amazing experience!”

-Dawn Cassidy

“My nephew Ted is father of 3 biological children. He is married to a Mexican woman. They take in foster children and have adopted several of them. One is Amaya from West Africa, another is Honey from Mexico, and the other is a Caucasian child.”

-Mary Jo Czaplewski

“I took this photo at the BAANA Nursery School in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in January, 2014, before the ebola epidemic. Today the schools are closed in Sierra Leone and its economic deprivations have only worsened. With schools out of session, children lack education and care and teachers lack wages. On top of ebola, starvation is a real concern. Nevertheless, this photo captured for me the beauty and resilience of the Sierra Leonian people who are determined in their faith that their nation will recover, dedicated to ensuring a better future, and forever full of smiles. This woman was soothing a distressed infant and invited me to “snap her,” lingo for taking a picture. I am engaged in consultation and technical assistance to various governmental entities and the Milton Margai College of Education and Technology in Sierra Leone, West Africa; this work assists the development of teacher preparation and family support programs. The nation's physical, civil, health, and to some extent social infrastructure was devastated by a 11-year civil war (1991-2001) that resulted in the loss of 50,000 lives and separated many families. There is a cohort of young adults who were traumatized by the war and entered adulthood without education or vocational preparation. Sierra Leone's infant mortality rate is #1 among developing countries and just 13% of children attend preschool. The adult literacy rate is 60% and the unemployment rate higher than 50% .”

-Anne Farrell

“An old family farm at the museum created by the man in the picture, in Iceland.”

-Marilyn Flick

“Man from Maasai tribe of Kenya. As part of a an education/mission trip to Kenya, I had the privilege to visit a Maasai village. The Maasai are the tribe known for preserving Kenyan culture. They are known for being courageous, generous, and honorable.”

-Chris J. Gonzalez

“This photo was taken in the Punakha Dzong in Bhutan in 2010. The group of young Buddhist monks were busy peeling apples but were also chatting and having a good time. Seeing them working together and enjoy themselves, it struck me that these men had left their childhood homes at a very young age but had created a family for themselves within the monastery.”

-Kristin Hadfield

“This photo is from a mission trip I attended to El Salvador in 2013. This trip's purpose was to visit three of the many orphanages in the capital of El Salvador and spend quality time with all of the children within the facilities. The organization I went with was called Visiting Orphans. Visiting Orphans is all about building quality relationships with the wonderful people you meet on these trips as well as aiding the people that you encounter in being successful individuals despite their unfortunate circumstances.”

-Kelsea Jones

“Our study abroad group from ECU visited a school in a poor rural area of Costa Rica. After presenting them with needed school materials and toys and watching them perform some dances and teaching them a couple of our own, we took food to a couple needy families. The picture is one such family where a Tica (Costa Rican woman) is raising her two daughters in a very small home with sheets as interior walls. Students were studying concepts of happiness and materialism.”

-Bryce Jorgensen

“Japanese wedding families, having final posing touches made in preparation for photos, on the grounds of Meiji Jingu, a Shinto Shrine in Tokyo, on May 26, 2010. The photo was taken on my return visit to Japan, having visited there in 1953 on my way to and from the Korean War zone. This was a day of sightseeing in Tokyo with my oldest daughter. We were strolling on the Meiji Jingu grounds when coming upon this wedding party.

-Bob Keim

“Young boy from the San Blas Islands in Panama. Taken July 2014.”

-Markell Kunzelman

“This picture was taken outside of a feeding center in Rogova, Romania back in 2009. This couple watched us provide medical services to local community members for two days before inviting us into their home to show some members of our team how they made homemade wine from the grapes above their entry way. This picture depicts a fairly traditional view of a Romanian couple and their home, by the couple’s mannerisms to how their home was set up and to the way they made a living (i.e., making wine and baking bread).”

-Julie Leventhal

“This photograph of a nearly-blind grandmother and her orphaned granddaughter was taken in June, 2007, in a squatter village located in the Phnom Penh, Cambodia, municipal dump. Too little food, inadequate housing, no clean water, lack of organized sanitation and abject poverty define the existence of this grandmother-headed household and the nearly 7000 other families who live and work in the dump site. This Cambodian grandmother, like many other elder-headed households in the village, faces daily struggles in searches for food, clothing, educational opportunities for her granddaughter, and adequate housing that might provide relief from the perils of their impoverishment.”

-Denise C. Lewis

“Jay Mancini and William (Hugh) Milroy (on the left) met in 1999 at a military families conference in Atlanta, where Mancini was speaking about building community capacity. Milroy at the time was a Royal Air Force Wing Commander. Shortly after retiring from the military Hugh was appointed as CEO of Veterans Aid, a leading charity in London, England focused on support of homeless ex-service members. Jay began consulting with Veterans Aid and in 2008 conducted research in London with men served by the charity, centered on the intersections of resilience and vulnerabilities. Hugh and Jay have spoken at several international conferences on these issues, in Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, Amsterdam, and upcoming in 2015, Vienna. This photo was taken in 2010 outside of the offices of Veterans Aid, located in London on Buckingham Palace Road. Hugh and Jay use the phrase ‘from welfare to well-being’ as they describe intervening in the lives of homeless men.”

-Jay A. Mancini

“A recently resettled Somali refugee family's first visit to New York City fulfills their desire to experience first hand the the eclectic melting pot of opportunity that they had envisioned about for years. It has been two years since they have been safely resettled into the northwestern region of the United States of America; they were glowing with euphoria to encounter the technological, familial, and cultural impacts of globalization that were indisputably palpable to them during their visit. The family was captivated by the compassion and hospitality that they experienced by locals, despite their cultural background and status.

-Neda Moinolmolki

“This picture I have taken in 2010 when visited a conference in the Eastern European Part of Russia, the Udmurt Republic capital city of Izhevsk. These women dressed the way Udmurt women would dress for a celebration (wedding in a rural areas till nowadays) and sang in the ethnic national Udmurt language (Finno-ugric language group), the songs' music and lyrics were Udmurt national. There are about 160 ethnic groups in Russia with a distinct language, culture, and customs that are vivid in life transition moments, such as weddings, baby births, etc.”

-Ilya Okhotnikov

“My wife and I were hiking the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal. We encountered many children caring for other, smaller children on the journey. This big sister had a big responsibility. Parents were busy moving supplies up and down the mountains and doing other jobs to provide for their families. Everyone has a job to do.”

-Kennon Rider

“I experienced a full spectrum of learning emotions during an MFT cultural and academic exchange trip in China. Especially enlightening was our time in the Guizhou rural villages, where families earn an average of $300 USD per year. As we traversed the earthen streets one morning, my camera caught this alleyway moment: a female villager pouring out her family's morning rice water. The familial routine of eating what had been harvested a few hundred yards from their home struck me as both private and intriguing. Every morning, there are millions of international family rituals taking place. This one moved me.”

-Kelly M. Roberts

“This photo presents an Orthodox Jewish family in Jerusalem. The frame does not represent the exact location, which is the Western Wall, directly underneath the bridge to the Dome of the Rock. I took this photo in July, 2014 during my 8 weeks in Israel conducting research for my dissertation.”

-Savannah E. Spivey

“This photo was captured in May 2014 during a walk through a small town in India. The town is located outside of a tiger reserve at Ranthambore National Park. This woman and her child were seen walking down the street of a market in the town. We did not speak each other's language, so we were not able to communicate through words.

-Sarah Taylor

“I took both these pictures in Kyoto, Japan this summer. I encountered the geisha pictured in the back streets of Gion late at night in Kyoto.”

-Bahira Sherif Trask

“A family gathering (rural Kenya, June 2010) in honor of my daughter, Amelia, and I (I was there working with Kenyan and Ethiopian universities on a capacity building project). They prepare the rice, reminisce with us, and catch up on our families even as the younger children hover to catch a word of privileged adult information and see the visitors who, for them, are from "long ago" and far away. These are Kamene Patricia Musembei's mother, Mama Rose, and other relatives. She is the former high school student of Kathleen and Stephan Wilson who were Peace Corps teachers who met, courted, and married in Kenya in the 1970s.

-Stephan A. Wilson

“This is a photo of my Sister-in-Law, Louise Crozier, and my Mother-in-Law, Mabel Winter, taken the week of Mother's Day 2014 in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, Canada. Little did we realize that in less than 2 months my sister-in-law would die from a very aggressive form of cancer. She died on July 22, and 2 weeks later on August 6, her mother-in-law had her 100th birthday. What was to be a large party was cancelled because of Louise's death.

-Cindy Winter

“I traveled to Haiti in January 2014 to work on rebuilding a school in the mountains of Yvon. Every night after we finished with our work families would come up to the building we were staying in and play games with us. The best part of my Haiti experience was being able to spend time every night talking with parents as they watched their children, but also being able to spend time solely devoted on being with the families versus focusing on all of the other things that seem to get in the way of just being with another person.”

-Krystal Woolston

“This photo was taken in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in May 2011. The photo is of a woman who has a business selling coconuts from a cart on a street corner. With a few deft strokes of a machete, she was able to clean a coconut and prepare a refreshing drink of coconut water. We found out the woman and her children had been abandoned by her husband and selling coconuts was one of the few options available for her to support her family.”

-Ani Yazedijian