One look at her page and I could see that Savannah wasn’t a pudgy 10-year-old in pigtails any more. She was a pretty, if somewhat hard-looking, teenager. But I could still see the little girl underneath.

Like the rest of the neighborhood, the orphanage experienced daily power failures and water shortages. Their biggest current need, our tour guide told us, leading us through a dim and barren common room, was soap. We asked for clarification. Some special kind of soap? A medicinal soap? Just soap, he told us.

In the first episode, we meet the mom-to-be, a regular, fresh-faced girl from some small town in Kentucky or Texas or South Dakota. Somehow she’s gotten five months pregnant, and everyone — family, friends, boyfriend, the girl herself — still seems a little dazed.

If you’re saying ‘I’m so busy I can’t deal with volunteers,’ then you actually need the help of volunteers.

Staff members work together in stressful, fast-paced environments on a regular basis. They need the opportunity to slow down, laugh, and build relationships with one another. This can happen simply by cooking a staff meal together, taking a field trip to another nearby RHY program, or spending a day together on a ropes course.

Every research study is designed to demonstrate the relationship between one thing and another. It’s about action and consequences: If you do a particular thing, will another thing reliably happen? The benefit is that, done well, research tells you which way to go.

It’s easy for adults like me to be outraged and wounded in advance for little girls like the one I’m describing, who after all are learning at such a tender age to value themselves only through the appraising eyes of their peers and and the frankly predatory older boys who seem to beckon them ever closer