Brian Pearce didn’t plan on a military career. When he graduated high school, he joined his local sheriff’s department, but after budget cuts eliminated his position, he enlisted in the Army in 1992, and was stationed throughout the U.S. and overseas. In 2003, after a three-year service break, he reenlisted. “After 9/11, I knew that whenever I came back on active duty I would go to Iraq or Afghanistan.”

 

Pearce was deployed to Mosul, Iraq, in 2005.

One day last year, a community health worker in Burundi returned to a CFC-O-supported health center with a terrible story: Simon, a man who lived in a nearby village, had been locked inside a room of his house without food and water and was left to die. His family had done this to him after discovering that he was sick with HIV. Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon practice in parts of the world. The aid workers at the health center immediately drove to Simon’s house and found him lying in his own fluids and at death’s door.