Maria Cruickshank has lived her life in the service of others. As a United Nations worker assigned to several peacekeeping missions, she has lived and worked in some of the most beautiful, interesting, and dangerous places on Earth. Now she shares her personal and professional memoirs of more than twenty years working to make the world a safer, more compassionate, and healthier place for all?qualities of basic human dignity that should never be taken for granted.

She grew up in turbulent Guatemala, and some of her earliest memories involve visiting her father in a high-risk prison in...