WHAT DRAWS ME AND INSPIRES ME IS THE RESILIENCE OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT.

born. I have met her three times in her short life, in Peshawar in Pakistan.

Afghans who have worked with Western journalists are accused of collaboration. That was my fate. At first the threats against my life were vague and unfocused. They became specific soon enough. The men behind the threats knew the location of my office in Kabul. They would come for me, they said.

I cannot go back now. I wonder if my daughter will recognize me when we meet again. I speak with my family by phone and in the daydreams that sustain me.

As a young man I volunteered at the Home for the Dying in Calcutta. That opened my eyes. I helped feed people. I cleaned floors. I took pictures. I couldn’t foresee how deeply it would affect me or that I’d spend much of my professional life trying to figure out what it meant to me. I saw it again in Nicaragua, then in El Salvador and dozens of countries since.

It’s not the poverty or class conflict or the suffering that draws me, not for its own sake. And I’m not interested in war stories, or talk of heroics and glory. What draws me and inspires me is the resilience of the human spirit. I try to capture the beauty of that spirit in my pictures.

An image of a mother and daughter at a gravesite in El Salvador isn’t just about the loss of a loved one. It’s also about the politics behind the formation of the death squad that put that boy in

I’ve always lived in rural Ontario, neighbour to sharecroppers and carpenters, farmers’ fields and big oaks. It’s peaceful, beautiful country. It feels good to return home after weeks on assignment — I edit pictures, tend to chores, plan new trips. From my studio I watch the Sydenham River wind its way south to Lake Erie.

After that first trip to India almost 40 years ago, I lived on the river for two and a half years, on a raft I made out of scrap wood. My children learned to swim in this river, as I did when I was a boy. It gave them the same experiences. It’s our shared inheritance. This land beneath my feet has taught me something about the connection between the spirit and where you live, and why I care about people who’ve been separated from where they belong, like Hashim.

Canada cannot return to me what I have lost, but it can share its future with me. My wife and I will raise our daughter here and, God willing, she will never know the legacy of war as her parents have. This will be her country, passed down by those who have relinquished our past.