06/21/2026
We were there to capture a sweet moment between a grandmother and granddaughter. But it became something else entirely.
She started talking about her daughter — the one who didn’t come back — and the grief just overwhelmed her, right there in the doorway.
Girl by girl, year by year, trafficking has quietly hollowed out this community. Three generations sat in front of my lens. One was missing entirely.
The young woman on the left beat the odds. With the support of Compassion and her local church..she found a place to belong — a place to be seen, heard, and known. The old pattern is slowly changing, but not fast enough.
Sadly, girls like her are rare here. They get promised something better, and they never return.
My heart broke sitting with that reality. Not in an abstract, far-away way — but right there, in that doorway, watching a grandmother weep over a daughter whose life was stolen…thinking of all the girls, just in this one small community, who will never make it home.
This is the part of humanitarian photography nobody prepares you for. The connections are real. The grief you witness is real. You form bonds with people in the span of an afternoon and leave carrying stories that were never yours to begin with. And the hardest part — the part that stays with you long after you’re home — is knowing you can’t help everyone. But I believe I was called to this. To use the skills God gave me, to bear witness, to tell the stories that the world might otherwise look away from. The hope I have in Jesus is what keeps me going and what holds me together in the doorways and in the grief and in the weight of it all.
