Social work Following completion of her master's degree, Dufka worked as a humanitarian volunteer and social worker in Latin America. She volunteered with Nicaraguan refugees during the
country's revolution, and with victims of the
1985 Mexico City earthquake. While in El Salvador, Dufka became close with local photojournalists, and was asked by the director of a local human rights organization to launch a program to document human rights abuses through photography. The director of the program was killed two weeks later, reportedly by
death squads. Dufka's photos of his body ran in
The New York Times, and she accepted the position. In 1998 Dufka went to
Nairobi, Kenya to cover the
bombing of the American Embassy. She arrived hours after the blast, and was deeply frustrated by 'missing the scoop.' Later, upon watching the news coverage of the attack, Dufka realized that she had lost “compassion” for the subjects of her work, and resolved to end her career as a photojournalist.
Human rights In 1999 Dufka left Nairobi to open a field office for
Human Rights Watch in
Freetown, Sierra Leone, where she documented human rights abuses associated with the country's
ongoing civil war. In 2002 she took a leave of absence to work as a criminal investigator for the Chief of Investigations and the Prosecutor for the
United Nations'
Special Court for Sierra Leone. Dufka returned to West Africa in 2005 to lead the Human Rights Watch field office in
Dakar, Senegal until 2011. ==Publications==