When I think about what got me started in my career as a humanitarian worker, it’s the moment of clarity standing in front of the haunting photos of prisoners in Tuol Sleng on my birthday. The prickles in the back of my neck as the blank stares of the dead look though me, mixed with a strangely misplaced sense of frustration almost three decades after the fact. How could the world have just stood by as millions of Cambodians were massacred by the Khmer Rouge?

That sense of injustice disillusioned me straight through my first year of law school. Facing a long stretch of corporate work or slow moving human rights law, I took the deep breath I wanted and returned to Phnom Penh a year later to become a legal intern in the Center for Social Development and a researcher for the Orphans Class in the Khmer Rouge Tribunals. I came back to the Philippines that summer with more awareness of the atrocities of the world, a sense of responsibility that I felt owed to people in countries I’ve never had a connection to, and the certainty that I wasn’t in the path I wanted to take. Five years ago, with no real sense of what I wanted to do, I accidentally started my career as a humanitarian worker.