It is widely believed that being openly gay in Jamaica is essentially a death sentence. That if you put your face on camera and admit you are gay, someone will come along and kill you.

Samuel Loewenberg, for the Pulitzer Center
Los Chorros, Chiapas

I first meet Maria Francisca Mendoza on the roof deck of a woman's organization known colloquially as Casa de la Mujer, where along with five other young women she is putting the finishing touches on a vagina made out of clay. They are now starting in on a set of brightly colored Fallopian Tubes.

I have only been in Oaxaca a few days when the protests start. In this, Mexico's second poorest state, political upheaval and fights over social justice go hand in hand with languid tourism, a vibrant art scene, and some of Mexico's best cooking. The central plaza, known as the Zocalo, is usually a giant tourist attraction and town meeting place, filled with overpriced restaurants, hawkers selling curios, old women pushing textiles, and children selling cigarettes and candy.

Signs of the earthquake in Haiti are everywhere in neighboring Dominican Republic. Hospitals are overflowing with the injured, aid workers fill the hotels, and signs asking people to send a text message and donate to the Haiti relief effort plaster the main thoroughfare through Santo Domingo.

Some of the most impoverished parts of the Dominican Republic are batayes - shantytowns that once housed sugar industry workers. For years, Haitian labor fueled the Dominican's large sugar industry. When the sector collapsed, many of these people had nowhere else to go – some had been in the country for decades and no longer had homes in Haiti; others were born in the Dominican Republic. Unemployment in the bateyes today is sky high; the HIV rate is also far higher than the national average.