I've been working on editing my photos from this winter and I've been realizing how emotionally overwhelmed I was when I was shooting at the Edhi Center in Islamabad. I went in there initially to spend time with and photograph the orphans at the center but I found myself even more intrigued by the dozens of older women that had found shelter there, many handicapped, some mentally ill and others perfectly healthy. Almost all had been thrown out of their homes or abandoned by family members, a phenomena I had always associated with the West before this, convinced that strong family values meant extreme loyalty to kin in Southeast Asian tradition. The stories I came across were heartbreaking and sometimes hard to digest. I found as in all who have suffered loss, more hope than I see in the world myself and ended up photographing this sense of community, of survival and of living for the day.