After a sleep-depriving round of midterms in our study abroad courses at the University of Cambridge, a friend and I finally embark on our long-awaited visit to Italy.

I was sweating profusely. Was it the sweltering heat, the spicy kimchi, or the nerves? I’m convinced it was a combination of all three.

Forced marriage, rape, malnutrition, and drunken teachers offering gifts in exchange for sex; one after the other, girls voiced the barriers they face in trying to complete primary school in Gulu District, Northern Uganda.

“Have you got what it takes to lead in a diverse world?” Based on these words, the Museum of Tolerance college internship program seemed like an incredible opportunity for me to learn about mentoring a coalition between Latino and Jewish high school students.

I am described as effortlessly astute, contagiously joyful, and cautiously spontaneous. I’m also boundlessly ambitious.

I wake up to a call from the Student Life office at two in the morning and start my walk across campus. Fifteen minutes later and I’m ready to go, cup of coffee in hand.

At the time, I wasn’t sure of my answer: “I think a good manager knows he or she doesn’t have all the answers, but does know where to look for them.”

“What is wrong with you!? These men are killers! They kill for a living, it’s only a matter of time before one of them snaps.

Nadia invited me to her apartment for what she described as a small “book club” meeting. Instead I found myself in a room overflowing with rural Moroccan women, dusty from hours of travel, eager to discuss the Qu’ran, women’s rights, and their relationship to democracy.

At lunch one day in high school, I was telling a few friends about my summer harvesting tomatoes on a farm.

The pilot in me theorizes that ideally, my journey to the law would have occurred in a straight line at high velocity.

Having restlessly toiled behind the counter of my dad’s dusty auto parts store for many years, I should have foreseen a day that I would look on my home with an outsider’s eyes.

It had never occurred to me to learn to box, let alone in Cairo. But the Russian Cultural Center, a converted villa with a small boxing gym, had always been an intriguing sight on my way to Arabic class.

Police sirens drew near. The sound of a fire truck followed. Then, an ambulance appeared. The scene that led to the arrival of these vehicles forced me into maturity.

The smile on Byron Halsey’s face on July 9, 2007, was the widest I’d ever seen. Standing on the marble front steps of the Elizabeth, New Jersey, courthouse in which he’d just sat, for what he hoped was the last time, he looked up at the sky and inhaled deeply.

The dust swirls around our Land Rover as we roll down the bumpy streets of Kailahun, the town on the eastern border of Sierra Leone where the brutal civil war erupted over sixteen years earlier.

With latex-covered hands and goggled eyes, I maneuvered the flask in my palm, scrutinizing it for a trace of my chemical product.

From the moment I first heard about No More Deaths, I wanted to support their work.

I belong to both the richest and the poorest nations of the Western Hemisphere, the United States, my mother’s country of origin, and Haiti, my father’s homeland.

Ben had just turned eleven when he was found in a state park holding a bag of marijuana. It was 9:30 on a Wednesday night in May.