My mom hasn’t woken up for three days…” The words came out of the little girl’s throat raw and broken as she pushed an old, dented wheelbarrow down a cracked dirt road that stretched endlessly through dry fields and silence. Her name was Lucía Morales, and she was only seven years old. The handles of the wheelbarrow were rusted and jagged, biting into her small palms until blisters split open and her hands burned with every step, but she did not stop. Inside the wheelbarrow, wrapped in blankets that were never meant to protect such fragile bodies from the cold dawn air, lay her newborn twin brothers, Mateo and Samuel.
They were not sleeping peacefully the way babies in picture books do. They were fighting—each shallow breath a quiet struggle, each faint sound a reminder that time was slipping away. Their home was miles from the nearest town, isolated among fields where nothing grew easily. A year earlier, their father had been killed in a workplace accident, leaving Lucía and her mother, Carmen, alone to survive on temporary jobs and hope. Hunger had become a familiar companion, fear an unspoken constant. Carmen had gone into labor alone, without a doctor, without a midwife, without anyone.
