We call her “Susan the Hatmaker” with all the affection the title can carry. This woman was willing to send her address to a stranger (who texts with improper grammar, no less), to make him a hat, to respond with an open heart. Who is she?

“I do great business during white elephant gift-giving season. A lot of people buy them as gag gifts, but many others have told me that I’ve saved their lives.”

“On weekends we’d go to parties from house to house with their friends and neighbors. My grandparents and their friends would play cards and dance. It was an honor if I got to step in for my grandmother. It fueled my love of Irish dancing.”

The problem is, she’s not normal. She’s outstanding. She’s strong and intelligent and caring and has overcome experiences in her life that most of her peers–thankfully–will never have to face. Her history, her abilities, and her grit have shaped her into a person that others will always treat as special, because she is, well…special.

I always try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt so that I can make a fair assessment of them. And I think that if you can’t get to that point as an adult, you will be seriously handicapped in whatever you’re trying to accomplish, because good people come in all shapes, forms, and sizes, but so do bad people. And sometimes you just gotta do the hard work and sit down and get to know a person before you can find out who’s who in this world.

Everywhere I go with Jean Brenneman, she can find someone she knows. She loves to make friends. She’s a very outgoing person, but even when she’s not trying to strike up a friendship, people seem drawn to her.

Like many places in the Philippines, powerful storms and flooding were a frequent problem. “I remember the lights would go off,” Elwie explains, “and we used to make shapes out of our hands with the candle light, and we would make our own little canoes and we’d canoe through the neighborhood. The water was only like a foot deep, but we were kids, so it seemed so high to us. So we would canoe through our village and get everyone smiling, waving at people and flinging the water. We made the best out of what we had.”

(Click below to read Elwie’s full story.)

“Let’s start off with food being free and not poisoned, and then let’s see how many social justice issues remain.”

When Jacinto was 12 years old, he left his parents and siblings in Guatemala and set out on a journey to Iowa. He came to the very heart of the nation which had devastated his own for decades. The nation that funded the killing of his uncle and thousands of others was the same that provided him with a new future.