In 1987, a young member of an Ixil community in Guatemala’s Highland Mountains peers through the walls of his shelter made of sticks during the 30-year war in the Central American country.

Photo by Mark Davis

Magdalena shows her husband’s work ID in hopes of finding news after he disappeared during the war near their village near Xix, Guatemala.

Photo by Mark Davis

Mark Davis

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While photographing two brave Ukrainian refugee families and their children Thursday at the Park County Library, I had to remind Galina Matsiakh to smile for the family portraits on two separate occasions. It wasn’t until we were walking back from the session that she told me why she was having a hard time being happy.

On June 6 a major dam in Nova Kakhovka, Ukraine was breached in a Russian-controlled area on the front lines of the war. The breach threatens countless families across the region and endangers Europe's largest nuclear power plant. The reservoir was contaminated with 150 tons of industrial lubricant and the release threatens agricultural land in its path for years. Damage left in its wake won’t be known until the water recedes.

Among those in the path of the deadly flood are Matsiakh’s family and friends. She hadn’t been able to contact them while she stood with her 6-year-old child for a photograph near the library.

“It is my home,” she said while apologizing.

While she now lives in Cody and had moved to Kyiv for her career, she was born in Kakhovka and lived her first 14 years in the city. Her heart is still there with family, friends and childhood memories.

Our conversation triggered memories of finding Magdalena in her one-room home made of sticks and its dirt floor in Xix, a small village in the Highland Mountains of Guatemala while I covered the war there as a college student in the 80s. I was photographing the woman, desperate for news about her husband.

She probably didn’t want to be photographed in that way, but she wanted to bring attention to her missing spouse. She held a photocopy of his work identification papers in her hands and begged for help while her children peered through the large margins between the branches used as walls in their home.

I knew at the time that many men from her village had been massacred, yet I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what I knew at the time. Hope was all she and her children had.

When I returned to the U.S. I wrote the story — part of a package of multiple stories — but was left heartbroken by the lack of concern by those who saw my words about Magdalena’s search and the extermination of many of Guatemala’s indigenous Indian population during the 30 years of battle over traditional Quiche and Ixil land. Those who had lived there for generations were simply in the way of government forces seeking to claim the land for their own.

My decisions then and witnessing the pain of those in other war torn countries have always haunted me. Maybe my stories didn’t relate the horrors of war. In attempts to console myself I made excuses for my failures.

I was young and inexperienced and my writing skills had yet to be fully explored, I tell myself. Yet, I sometimes I continue to struggle to be compassionate.

Honestly, it’s hard to understand something until you experience it yourself and even then, no matter how much experience you have with relating a story, helping others understand the horrors you saw is difficult.

Today I feel guilty for asking for that smile. My goal was to show the families at their best. Understandably, being at your best is difficult when your home is under attack and your friends and family are still in the path of a lethal war machine.

What I do know and hope to relate is that parents — no matter where they reside — love their children. They want their families to be safe and to give the next generation opportunities to have better lives than they have.

More than 500 children have been killed in attacks in the past year in Ukraine. Countless children died in Guatemala during the 30-year war, many from starvation and the lack of medicines for commonly treatable diseases.

In every war — even in internal struggles within the U.S. — lives of innocent people are treated like statistics by those on the outside. But when you take the time to look at the reflection of a child through their parents’ eyes, realizing they have the exact same worries for their offspring as your own parents or as you do for your children, the only sane response is to act to end their suffering and ensure their safety.

“We will never give up,” Matsiakh told me of the Ukrainian people. Their culture is at least as old as that of Russia despite only gaining independence in the past 30 years or so. Some will claim it’s not our problem.

Much of what I say is tossed out with the daily garbage, used to wrap china or in the bottom of your pets’ cages. I’ve seen more attention paid to scores of sporting events than foreign wars. Let’s pray that we never face the bombs of foreign invaders and that we don’t find ourselves burying more of our children like those facing conflict around the world.

I only ask that you try to understand — from your experiences with your own families — the true effects of war no matter where they are. Imagine your loved ones under fire. Imagine what you would do to save them. Imagine feeling hopeless and finally deciding to abandon everything you know and the people you love to get your family to safety — even if that means walking to the nearest country with a language you don’t speak that will allow your safe passage.