Last weekend I stayed at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs, California. I had an amazing time relaxing in the desert with some witty, vivacious and thoroughly entertaining friends. We laughed a lot, and talked incessantly. We also met a couple of people whose lives were vastly different to ours. I had a massage at the hotel's spa, where I met Alicia, a mother of three who moved to the U.S. after four balaclava-clad armed men stormed into her home in the Michoacan region of Mexico in the mid-90s and demanded she hand over her cash, the profits from her convenience store, and the keys to her car while her terrified children froze at the sight of the machine guns being pointed in their faces. Alicia said she couldn't trust the local police, who never bothered to follow-up her complaint about the armed bandits who invaded her home, so she abandoned her property, a successful business, and her culture and country in order to seek refuge in America for the sake of her children. Alicia told me she missed Mexico dearly, and was extremely proud of her heritage and her beautiful homeland, but the fear of her children being kidnapped, and of being raped like so many other women she knew, meant she could not live in peace. Later that afternoon, I met some Marines who had recently returned from deployment in Kandahar, Afghanistan. One of them had a badly scarred arm, the result of shrapnel wounds which he was now attempting to use to attract ladies with rather vulgar pleas to kiss it better. After unsuccessfully trying to chat me up with cheesy lines about my accent, the soldier who had approached me began revealing details of his duty after realizing my curiosity about the war in Afghanistan was genuine. Hailing from Georgia, this kid was only 21 (and horrified when I told him I was 28!) and had spent seven months in Kandahar before a suicide bomber exploded in front of him, leaving him partially deaf and afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder. After receiving therapy for a short period, he told me he was back at base in the Californian desert and was preparing to be re-deployed to a different province in Afghanistan, despite the fact he still awoke many nights drenched in cold sweat after experiencing nightmares. He also told me that his fiancée had broken off their engagement to take up with his best friend while he was in Afghanistan, and this had exacerbated his depression. Innocently, he said he had been surprised to learn that many of the women in Afghanistan are extremely beautiful and very kind to the Marines, and will bring them food and smile warmly while the American soldiers patrol their communities. I was pleased to see that this sweet young soldier appreciated the kindness of the Afghanis. I was also happy to see that he appreciated his President's efforts to bring these soldiers home. He told me he couldn't wait to get out of the military and study criminal justice, and thought that maybe, one day, he should become a lawyer. I told him it sounded like a pretty good plan.