War, economic injustice, political violence and social discrimination take a heavy toll on the majority of our world's inhabitants. We witness this on television and read about it in newspapers, but the suffering depicted rarely affects us for long. The short stories in this book are based on the lives of real people in Asia living with this suffering. Each story tells of the differences between their lives and ours but each story also tells of their courageous struggle to survive. Their struggle is what must give us energy to continue in our own struggle to build a better world.