And, of course, danger: our photographer Bryan Denton was recently hit by an ISIS car bomb in Iraq, our team in Mogadishu was frighteningly close to a deadly explosion in January, travel in Yemen is severely restricted. The list goes on and on.

Much more impactful, in terms of human understanding and growth, was the afternoon I spent with Nidaa Badwan, an artist in Gaza who locked herself in her room for a year because she could not cope with the situation. I’ll never forget the young Israeli hipster who had tattooed her grandfather’s Auschwitz number on her forearm. Or the strength of Rachel Fraenkel, whose son was among the three yeshiva boys kidnapped in the occupied West Bank, as she awaited word whether he was alive (he was not).

The idea of NYT Global is to grow our audience around the world and to make The Times a truly international news organization. That means expanded coverage in Australia and Canada, where the decline of the local media has left readers clamoring for quality journalism. It means building our brand across Europe to showcase our coverage of Europe as well as our indispensable service journalism on health and food, our innovative visual-first projects, our podcasts. It means evolving our Spanish and Chinese websites. It means helping build out lines of coverage on climate change, gender, technology and urbanization that resonate in every corner of the world. And it means working across the newsroom to ensure that the report is not presumptively American, that we don’t send the message to readers abroad that this is not for them.

That’s what I know right now, but Global is new and entrepreneurial and looking for opportunities to seize. We’d love to hear readers’ ideas about how to get their friends and neighbors engaged with Times journalism. Send your suggestions to global@nytimes.com.

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