Before the arrival of my son last year, I had big plans for the kind of child I would raise. He would be an excellent eater, eager to consume whatever I offered him. But reality intervened: At 16 months, he poked suspiciously at anything resembling a vegetable.

With my sights set on our upcoming Thanksgiving dinner—and a vision for my little cherub to join us for our annual family feast—I sought the advice of author Karen Le Billon. In her book French Kids Eat Everything, she recounts her family’s food and cultural immersion from a year living in France.

The French have a strong culture of food. More than just feeding their children for nourishment, they consider teaching kids about food to be a critical part of their early education. The unwritten rules of eating in France challenge Le Billon to rethink her approach, as she assumes greater ownership of deciding what and when her kids eat. She and her husband and kids eat together; they offer the children a wide range of dishes, cheerfully insisting that they try what’s served, all the while instilling good table manners and patience for slower-paced meals.

At first the children protest, and Le Billon admits to failed attempts. However, with persistence and enthusiasm, both of her young children happily enjoy fresh, healthy, and diverse meals.

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The photos that emerged from Haiti in recent days—nearly a month since the earthquake—show what life has become for individuals and families now living in temporary homes, representing a tiny fraction of the nearly one million people left homeless.

In the moments and days following the earthquake, each one of the survivors set forth to perform the tasks and experience moments of everyday life that we all share—caring for children, laundry washed and hung to dry, boys playing with toy cars. Captured so beautifully in this small collection of photos, these images reveal the intimate details of each of these lives.

Photo: Liz Lucas / Oxfam America

Every day for the past two weeks, I’ve been reviewing the photos sent from our colleagues on the ground in Haiti. Together, they form a document of the devastating earthquake and the recovery effort—some showing the grim reality of the aftermath, others capturing the humanity of the situation with increasing hope and hints of everyday life. From these images, I’ve gotten a good sense of the reality on the ground, despite being thousands of miles away.

Here are a few of the most notable images so far:

Photo: Liz Lucas / Oxfam America

Photo: David Stubbs / Oxfam America

Sometimes it’s the small details that can make a photo compelling. In the above image from Peru, the visual beauty of the blue sky constrasts starkly with the reality of the subject matter: the barbed wire, chain-link fence, and plateaus of digging around a mineral mine in Cerro de Pasco, Peru.

Photo: Rebecca Blackwell / Oxfam America

Members of a village savings group in Mali. Rebecca Blackwell’s photo beautifully captures the graphic details of the vivid fabrics that the women are wearing, as well as this gesture of welcome and respect that the women use to begin their meetings.

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