Global Lens Reflections on life, the universe, and everything
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No going back Women in Nepal rely on education, faith, and credit to build better future By Paul Jeffrey Published in response magazine January 2024 Mamata Karki couldn’t find work in her home village in rural eastern Nepal, so she took her two daughters and moved to the capital city of Kathmandu. “My husband didn’t […]
Where God Changes People
Ministry at Cookson Hills Center in Oklahoma By Paul Jeffrey Published in Response magazine November 2013 When Laurie Rowell started abusing drugs, she knew it was time to quit her job as a nurse. She didn’t want to go to work while high and put her patients’ lives at risk. But quitting work just […]
Rebuilding Liberia
Women continue to lead struggle against violence and poverty By Paul Jeffrey Published in Response magazine in September 2014. Like many Liberian women today, Tomrah Topka has gone back to school. Every morning the 25-year old settles into a high school classroom in Monrovia, the African nation’s capital, surrounded by much younger girls. But she’s […]
Violence and poverty push families to flee Central America
By Paul Jeffrey Published in response magazine in April 2015. Vilma Maldonado’s son Jesus left their home in Honduras in 2010. After a military coup the year before, gangs and police took turns terrorizing the town where they lived on the country’s north coast. Jesus got death threats. With the country’s murder rate among the […]
Breaking the circle of poverty
Encouraging financial literacy in Georgia By Paul Jeffrey Published in response magazine in 2016 Life was good for Sonnet Pichardo. Until it wasn’t. After going to college, giving birth to five children, serving several years in the military, including two tours in Iraq, all of a sudden she had to flee her marriage. She filed […]
Domestic work is work
Taking the side of Hong Kong’s migrant domestic workers By Paul Jeffrey Published in response magazine in March 2019 Fitriani lived with her grandmother as a child, because both her parents left their home in Surabaya, Indonesia, to get better-paying work abroad. They would come home once a year to visit, then leave again. Fitriani […]
Standing with the women of Olongapo
United Women in Faith accompanies women around U.S. military base in the Philippines By Paul Jeffrey Published in response magazine in May/June 2023 Hannah Alarcon was just 15 years old in 2005 when her old sister invited her to take a one-hour bus ride from their home in a rural village to the big […]
A place for the forgotten
South Korea’s aging sex workers demand justice By Paul Jeffrey Published in response magazine October 2018 The old woman sits in her tiny room, a small electric heater failing to keep at bay the winter cold that seeps through the thin walls. Her only company is a pair of dogs she rescued off the streets […]
Women in India: The legacy of United Methodist Women
Pioneer missionary spirit persists amid cultural and political change Published in response magazine in 2020 By Paul Jeffrey Educating girls was not a very popular idea in India in 1870, so when Isabella Thoburn opened a simple classroom for six girls in a mud-walled room off the market in Lucknow, she posted a guard at […]
Respite from radiation
Japanese youth travel to summer camp in California By Paul Jeffrey Published by response magazine in 2014. As Japan continues to struggle with the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that crippled the Fukushima nuclear power plant, a group of youth who live close to the troubled plant escaped for two weeks to […]
A safe place for Roma children in Berlin
Amid discrimination and racism, a neighborhood church provides a safe place for kids By Paul Jeffrey Published in response magazine in July/August 2013. Yuliana Marinovah arrives home in the morning just in time to see her two boys off to school. She works all night cleaning restaurants in Berlin, a job for which she […]
History and hope in Alaska: Changing mission on the last frontier
By Paul Jeffrey Published in response magazine in 2018. Sitting at the end of Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, surrounded by mountains and water, the city of Homer thrives on fishing and tourism. It’s at the end of the road, a long way from the political tensions that captivate much of the nation’s 24-hour news cycle. […]
Okinawa’s long struggle against militarism
Seminar examines connections between war and violence against women By Paul Jeffrey Published in response magazine in May-June 2020. On an island torn by decades of war, there’s one small space dedicated to peace. Perched atop cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean on the island of Okinawa, the Cornerstone of Peace memorial park has row after […]
Making peace on the streets of Los Angeles
By Paul Jeffrey Published in response magazine in 2005. Kenny Green is cruising through Wilmington when he sees Alberto Chacon. He pulls over and the two greet each other with an elaborate handshake. Mr. Chacon, an 18-year old known by his gang pseudonym of “Mugsy,” is just back from a stint in the county jail, […]
Trouble in Paradise
Hawaii’s Susannah Wesley Community Center provides support for victims of human trafficking By Paul Jeffrey Published by response magazine in September 2012 Singha Naubon was tired of working hard and barely surviving. A native of Isan in the dry northeast of Thailand, the country’s poorest region, Mr. Naubon and his wife Thamonwan struggled to grow […]
A year in Pictures – 2022
As 2022 began, I continued my fascination with the images crafted by the Spanish photographer Xavi Bou, who captures the trajectories of birds in flight by extracting individual frames from high-speed video and then combining them into one image file. It’s a process that allows us to “see” something our eyes alone can’t visualize. Here’s […]
A Year in Pictures – 2021
When I got my first coronavirus vaccine shot almost a year ago, I had high hopes that 2021 would prove different than its predecessor. I started to make plans for trips abroad. And then came shot number two, and I felt ready to take on the world. Sadly, the world wasn’t as fortunate as me. […]
Europe welcomes refugees
When I heard the news that some governors in the United States were trying to forbid the resettlement of Syrian refugees in their states, I remembered the wet infants I’d been handed on Lesbos. As rubber rafts overloaded with refugees floundered in the surf off the Greek island, photographers weren’t exempt from helping to get […]
Pilgrimage to Hiroshima & Nagasaki
It’s safe behind the camera. There’s enough stuff to think about–aperture, shutter speed, framing–that I can usually stay somewhat detached from the emotion in front of the lens, be it grief or anger or levity. But what usually occurs at a professional distance has a bad habit of sneaking up on me later. So it […]
South Sudan – Is there hope?
Cecil the Lion is dead. In an act that has been rightly criticized all over the world, a Minnesota dentist traveled to Zimbabwe and paid a lot of money to wound the iconic lion and then chase him for two days before finally killing the animal and skinning him to take home a “trophy” to […]
South Sudan: New nation, old problems
When fighting broke out in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, in December, Asanta Jantana quickly gathered her seven children and fled for another part of the country where she hoped she could find peace. They hitched a ride on a truck for a day, then walked the last 12 miles to her brother’s house in the […]
Jumping Rope
When I was a kid at Lincoln Elementary School in Vancouver, Washington, I preferred the monkey bars during recess and would frequently hang there, often upside down, watching my classmates jump rope while chanting some rhythmic rhyme. In that pre-modern universe it was only girls that jumped rope, of course. Any attempt by a boy […]
f8 Belgrade
I don’t think I’d last long in an office. Don’t get me wrong, it would be nice to never break a sweat, to have a fast internet connection, to never get your feet wet, to not have to run through an airport to catch a connecting flight. But it would be so . . hmm, for […]
Hugo Chavez
I met Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in January 2000 in the aftermath of horrible mudslides that ravaged the steep hillsides of Caracas and the country’s northern coast. I covered the response to the disaster, and spent part of my time in a steep ravine where the Catuche River flows into the center of the capital. Over […]