In 1994, South African photojournalist Kevin Carter won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. The photograph that brought him fame depicted an emaciated Sudanese child crawling toward a feeding center—under the hard stare of a nearby vulture.

The image, which so powerfully captured the horror of famine-stricken Sudan in the early 1990s, drew international attention to both Sudan's suffering and to Kevin Carter's career. But with Carter's acclaim came the questions. People wanted to know—what had happened to the child? After snapping his camera, what had Carter done to help the dying child?

Painfully, Cater admitted that after spending about 20 minutes framing the shot, he had simply walked away. Within two months of receiving journalism's most coveted award, the 33-year-old photojournalist took his own life.

Kevin Carter had been raised in a devoutly religious home, but he had long since left his upbringing behind. Now he'd seen too much of the world's suffering, and he could no long cope. He parked his pickup truck near where he had played as a child, attached a garden hose to the exhaust pipe, and breathed in the fumes. "I'm really, really sorry," he said in a note left on the seat beside him. "The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist...."

Dr. Warren Cooper, a Christian, works as a surgeon with Samaritan's Purse in southern Sudan. The suffering Warren has seen among his patients is indescribable. And yet, after five years in a hospital that has been called "a living history museum of pathology," he has no plans to leave.

How does Dr. Cooper cope?... For Warren, the field of medicine allows him to live out his Christian faith—not just in word, but in deed. "I think it'd be very hard to continue doing this if your didn't have a sense of ultimate meaning to what you were doing," he says.