Joshua, 10, holds a toy gun he bought in the market outside the barbed wire fence of the United Nations mobile operating base near the village of Nyabanira. The UN has 34 mobile operating bases in North Kivu, small military encampments planted in or near villages to provide security and communications in Congo. Living within this downward spiral of violence has severe consequences, not least the effects of living traumatized by war and in a culture that seems to have forgotten its children.

Blind men wait for a training class at the Mariri Vocational Training Center near Kano, Nigeria.

US Capitol Police officers relay orders at the foot of the US Capitol where fellow officers arrested anti war protesters who stormed their line during a large march in Washington DC against the war in Iraq.

Young nuns doze during morning prayers.

They are called Guardian Angels and the mission of these US Air Force para-rescuemen is not to drop bombs, but to save lives and bring home troops doing battle in Afghanistan. All are trained trauma medical technicians who can perform battlefield surgery under enemy fire. "These aren't numbers, these are our family, our brothers, sisters, husbands, wives and children," said Pararescueman Vincent Eckert, from Tucson, Ariz. "We've kind of become a jack of all trades. These are the things we do so that others may live. Aboard a HH-60 G, "Pave Hawks", helicopter, Staff Sgt. Joshua Keyes, 30, Alturas, Cal., a Para-rescueman or "PJ", (Para-jumper) of the 55th Expeditionary Rescue Squadron of the USAF, keeps watch over the terrain, in Kandahar Province in Afghanistan as he proceeds on a rescue mission to bring in a "code alpha" casualty from the battlefield.

Tibetan refugee nuns line up with their bowls to receive dinner at the Sakya Nunnery in Dehradun, India which is a refuge for nuns and young women who have escaped repressive conditions in Tibet and Nepal. Women and girls of many different backrounds, ranging from age five to 40, have found their way to Sakya Nunnery often surviving treachourous escapes out of the Himalyan region. With the opressive Chinese government sharply hampering the religious lives of Buddhist nuns and monks and young women whose few opportunities often include the risk of abuse and sex-trafficking, the Sakya Nunnery is a safe haven indeed.

Rakshana Begum, right, squats in a corner of her house in the shadow of her husband. There is a shortage of brides in the village about 100 miles south of New Delhi, India, so her husband paid 4,000 rupees or $90 to have her trafficked in from northern India. Husband Israel Khan, 26, says, "I was poor and couldn't get a wife here." Rakshana has given him two sons. He is no longer poor; he owns five water buffaloes and a cell phone.

Security men for Afghan warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum prepare to search visitors at his compound in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Varsha Hitkari is helped to a drink of water by her parents. Her husband hung her from the shower head after she gave birth to a second girl instead of the son he wanted. Her brother found her in time to save her life, but she was in a coma for six weeks and has not been the same since. Her second daughter, Pari, 18 months old, wears a shirt that says "boy" and drinks from her bottle at their home in Kanpur, India. Her father, Ramesh Chandra, cannot afford the 200,000 rupees (about $4,500 dollars) needed for the kind of physical therapy she will need to recover. Local police have not arrested anyone for the crime.

Santa Mapenzi, 16, learns to sew at the HEALing Arts program at HEAL Africa hospital in Goma. She and her baby Simeoni, 1 yr., who was conceived when she was raped, have spent three months in the hospital's traumatic fistula ward. The Christian charity HEAL Africa, in the eastern Congo city of Goma, offers a full slate of services to women who have been sexually assaulted: surgery to repair rape-torn tissues, psychological and legal counseling, pastoral care, vegetable gardens to maintain, and a workshop that teaches sewing.

Women listen intently durning class at a reading center in Karachi, Pakistan. Many schools offer classes to illiterate woman so they bring their learning home. National Commission for Human Development has started 108,000 adult literacy centers in Pakistan since 2002 and have taught 2.6 million women to read. Their yearly goal is to start 100,000 centers each year and teach 2.5 million women to read.

Obstetric fistula is a debilitating condition in which women injured in childbirth uncontrollably leak a trail of urine or feces. While a delivery by caesarian section prevents obstetric fistula, in sub-Saharan Africa such medical procedures and prenatal care rarely exist. As many as three million women, many in Ethiopia, suffer the devastating effects of this injury, while being shunned by the patriarchal society of their clans and villages. The Bahar Dar Fistula Hospital is one of the few refuges for these suffering women. Netsanet Feleke, 15, stands in a mud house in her village in Bure, Ethiopia. She has been leaking urine, and with no medical care available nearby, she must travel a few hours to the Bahar Dar Hamlin Fistula Center, in Bahar Dar, Ethiopia.

An man stands on a hill at a refugee camp outside the United Nations Peacekeeping base in Kiwanja, Democratic Republic of the Congo. More than a thousand families now live in small thatch and tarp huts outside the Monuc base in Kiwanja. Many other families have temporarily settled in tents even farther from the fighting. Throughout the region, people have returned to their villages to find their homes looted or burned, and their crops stolen or destroyed. The scale of violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has grown so critical that Human Rights Watch recently estimated 90,000 people who live in the Kivus have been in the last few months been displaced by the fighting and the marauding.

Boys wait their turn for vaccinator Sani Mohammed to administer two drops of polio vaccine on their tongues at a stationary vaccine site. Polio vaccinators fan out across the Fagge Government Area, in Ward Kwciri, looking for children under the age of 5 on Day One of the Immunization Plus Day, sponsored by UNICEF around Kano, Nigeria.

Ethiopian Orthodox Priest Surgowe Addis, drinks his tea in his mud hut in Bure, a town in the Woundgee area of northern Ethiopia. In the corner is his Kazera, a walking stick.

Each year, thousands of visitors coat themselves in the healing mud of the Dead Sea in Israel. Thursday, February 2, 2006

Women who make it to the Bahar Dar Hamlin Fistula Center, in Bahar Dar, Ethiopia are the lucky ones. No women suffering from fistula is ever turned away.

Antonio Benson, 44, stands outside a convienience store in Washington DC watching the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Parade.

Shereen placed a ball of pure opium on a small piece of foil she had pulled from her cigarette pack. Balancing it in her shaky hands Đ a lit cigarette dangling from her lips - she heated the bottom foil until the opium rose from the burning ashes into her mouth. With deep breaths, she filled her lungs with the dark smoke. The only sound, a whimper coming from her parsed dried lips as she took another hit. Shereen lives in the high crime neighborhood of KabulŐs District 2, ŇMy husband is an addict too. He doesnŐt want to quit. I wish I could stop but I canŐt Đ I donŐt know how to. My husband wonŐt let me go to the clinic and if he knew anyone was here he would kill me.Ó MOTHER'S LITTLE HELPER

Polio's Line in the Sand Polio is a highly infectious virus that cripples those children it does not kill. In 2002, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it had contained polio to three countries and was close to eradicating it. An unprecedented, sustained and multibillion-dollar global effort had confined the virus to Nigeria, Pakistan and India, and WHO was closing in on victory. But it didn't happen that way. A vaccine to eradicate polio became a line in the sand for Muslim clerics. Religious zealotry and misinformation coerced villagers in the Muslim north of Nigeria into refusing polio vaccinations and led to the re-emergence of polio just a few years after it had nearly joined smallpox on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s list of eradicated diseases. The governor of Kano state, Sheik Ibrahim Shekarau, banned the polio vaccine, saying that the U.N. vaccine was part of a larger Western conspiracy: It was better to lose a dozen children now than to raise a generation of sterile women and AIDS-infected men. Over the next four years, more than 3,000 of Nigeria’s unprotected children were infected with polio, and the contagion spread. By 2006, WHO reported, more than 3,000 children were crippled by polio and more than 20 countries reinfected with the Nigeria strain of the virus. But now, global authorities think they have one last, best chance to conquer this disease. Gov. Shekarau has reversed himself, declaring his support for a new polio vaccine. Immunization campaigns are back on the streets, administering the polio vaccine drop by drop. As Muslim suspicion of the polio vaccine lingers, Nigeria is coping with hundreds of polio survivors, children and now young adults who are crippled or paralyzed, and the continuing Muslim-Christian friction in Africa's most populous and potentially unstable nations. Caption Polio victim Abubakar, 6, crawls on the dirt floor of his home near Kano, Nigeria, past the footprint of his mother. He contracted polio during the ban on the polio vaccine.

A little boy who calls himself, "Michael Jackson", Mohammad and Ahmed stand outside the fence of Forward Operating Base Salerno, asking for cookies from American military personel leaving the chow hall near Khost City, Afghanistan. ŇMadame, his name is Michael Jackson,Ó yelled Ahmed, the eldest boy in the group, pointing to the smallest boy. ŇMadame, cookies,Ó yelled the younger one, pretending to limp and mimicking basic Michael Jackson moves on the rocky soil beneath his old torn up sandals.

Brevard County Sheriff's Dep. Arnold Smith has seen crime go up and an increase in evictions and suicides since the demise of the Space Shuttle program. His department has served over 2600 evictions since 2011. "Ten years down the road it is going to be a desert down here, " he said. Smith informs Melissa Nixon, 36 and her boyfriend that they will be evicted from their Cocoa Beach apartment in one hour. He serves eviction notices every day. (Nixon and boyfriend who declined to give his name, did not work at Kennedy Space Center) Photograph by Mary F. Calvert

Gun toting Fatah party supporters revel in the streets on election night in Gaza City in the Palestinian Territories. Hamas later declared victory.

Tom Hall, 65, has been a cook for eleven years at Chick and Ruth's Delly on Main Street in Annapolis, Md. He pauses during the morning breakfast rush to say the Pledge of Allegiance. The pledge is a morning tradition, seven days a week at the neighborhood coffee-shop. Behind him is fellow cook Alex Balmes, 27.

Kabul residents go about their business in the poorest areas of Kabul as a battle against the Taliban looms in Kandahar in the south of Afghanistan. HIGH HEELS

Afghan children run up a street that separates the village of Hutal from the barbed wire covered walls of Combat Outpost Rath, home to members of Blackwatch Unit, Bravo Company 2nd Battalion 1st Infantry Regiment, with the 5th Stryker Brigade, in the Maywan District of Kandahar Province, Afghanistan.

Graduating Midshipman and Marines from the United States Naval Academy cheer the Blue Angel fly-over at the start of their graduation ceremony at Navy-Marine Corps Stadium in Annapolis, MD.

Carcasses of dead animals dot a village outside of Kalafo, Ethiopia. Drought conditions in the Somali region of Ethiopia bring villagers to the brink of famine with dead crops and livestock.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the most desperate countries in the world to be a child. Despite abundant natural beauty and fertility, armed conflict and related hunger and disease have killed an estimated 5 million people here since 1998--- a veritable second Holocaust that the International Rescue Committee says claims 45,000 new lives every month. The smallest victims and survivors of this catastrophe are children. The ongoing fighting puts millions of them at risk of abuse, disease, grinding poverty and exploitation by soldiers on both sides of the conflict. Living within this downward spiral of violence has severe consequences, not least the effects of living traumatized by war and in a culture that seems to have forgotten its children. With few toys, children make their own out of old jerry cans. More than a thousand families now live in small thatch and tarp huts outside the United Nations peacekeeping base in Kiwanja. Without peace, the Congolese people are among the poorest on the planet. The scale of violence has grown so critical that Human Rights Watch recently estimated 90,000 people who live in the Kivus have in the last few months been displaced by the fighting and the marauding militias.

A man walks his camel down the Clifton Beach in Karachi, Pakistan. He provides rides for tourists for about 100 Rupees. CAMEL WALK

Liman Maikaji picks up his son Abubakar, 6, who is crippled with polio, at his family home in the village of Rimin-Gado outside of Kano, Nigeria. Religious zealotry and misinformation have coerced villagers in the Muslim north of Nigeria into refusing polio vaccinations and led to the re-emergence of polio just a few years after it nearly joined smallpox on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s list of eradicated diseases.

Sakya Nunnery nuns keep their hair short or their heads bald. Ngawang Norzin, 26, shaves the head of fellow nun Kunga Chodher, 24, in the courtyard of the nunnery.

Nuns Lekshay Choekyi, 17, and Ngawang Tsedron, 5, eat noodles for dinner. Ngawang was brought to the nunnery from Nepal by her eldery grandmother. The Sakya Nunnery in Dehradun, India is a refuge for nuns and young women who have escaped repressive conditions in Tibet and Nepal.

Florence, 18, her sister Anita, 6, (obscured) and two other men are apprehended by UN peacekeeping troops after a firefight with rebels in a field near the UN base in Kiwanja, Democratic Republic of the Congo. They said they hid in the bush for cover but the UN held them because they were suspected of rebel involvement. With more than 16,600 soldiers, the U.N. Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo -- Monuc, by its French acronym -- is the largest and most complex peacekeeping effort in U.N. history. The local populations are still not comfortable sharing information that would made it easier to catch the FDLR and other rebels groups, MONUC officials in Goma and Kinshasa lamented. They also say civilians are reluctantly harboring militias or allowing rebels to pass through their villages unreported, a silence that is more fearful than protective.

Delshawnda King, 25, and Keonda King, 20, sisters of LaVonda, Nikki King, victim of the Washington DC Metro crash, honor her memory in a funeral service at Faith Missionary Baptist Church in Capitol Heights, Md. Cited as the deadliest train crash in Metro history, Monday's rush-hour collision between two transit trains left 9 dead including community-admired LaVonda King. Keonda King, 20, holds her dead sister's son Andre, 3, while church nurse Diane Thompson looks on.

Police Maj. Honorine Munyole takes the statement of Giselle, 15, who was summoned to the police station by officers who caught the young man she said raped her two weeks earlier. Munyole created the sexual violence unit in Bukavu and has expanded it to almost 30 officers Ń barely enough, she says. "Men will not stop raping women as long as they are almost sure to get away with it," Munyole says. "Right now, they know they will not be caught, and until the impunity has disappeared, there is nothing to stop them."

Aliza Sikiliza (left) goes into labor in a dark room at Masika Katsuva's farm. She was abducted by soldiers and held in captivity as a sex slave for five months before escaping. She is about to have the baby of one of her rapists. Katsuva listens with a stethoscope to the moaning woman's belly, then leaves her alone. "Mamma Masika," as Katsuva is called, says the farm has helped nearly 6,000 women since it opened in 2000. More women turn up at the farm every week, and some go into labor on the rough journey to the farm.

Monkeys enjoy a dawn hop around the walls of Amber Fort near Jaipur, India.

Girl's families pay 20-30 Rupees per child per month to attend the Higher Secondary School in the Kashmir town of Gundi Piran in the Patika District. They need text books for 6-10 subjects at a cost of 500-600 Rupees per month. The younger students hold class in the open air, often relying on a campfire for warmth.

With record bumper crops of opium, Afghanistan finds itself adding opium addiction to its long list of problems. Women count for 13% of the country's addicts and 7% of addicts are children. This "mother's little helper" cures a multitude of ills; it fills an empty belly, takes the place of medicine, doctors and dentists that a family cannot afford, and dulls the pain of several generations of war. The Sanga Amaj Treatment Center, Social Services For Afghan Women operates a clinic in Kabul for women and children suffering from opium addiction. CAPTION ŇPlease,Ó said a man in Dari, as he held a child over his shoulder in the Kabul street. ŇSome money for my child.Ó The childŐs eyes were dilated. Thin, malnourished and visibly high on opium, his body was too weak to move. Beggars on Kabul's streets often use their addicted children as bait to bring in more money.

Graduates Tyler Christopher Sordelet, Allison Christine Aichele, and Jennifer Antonia Rubin toss their hats at the end of the commissioning ceremony for the U.S. Naval Academy's class of 2010 at Navy- Marine Corps Memorial Stadium in Annapolis, Md.

A lone visitor to the Jefferson Memorial, Kim Seung Hoon walks down the edge of the marble steps facing the Tidal Basin.

An Indian family rides through the streets of Bangalore, India. Indian women are often stuck in marriages with men they do not choose, raising only sons. Sons are preferred in India because boys will be more prosperous and take care of their aging parents. They carry on the family name and are the ones to inherit family wealth.

Being thirteen years old in America is not what it used to be. With everything from growth hormones in milk to rampant sex and violence on TV, kids just grow up faster than they used to. Mary Stone Eddins, 13, is learning to juggle more than boys and homework in this challenging world.