I was scrolling through news in a hostel in Medellín when I saw it. A photo of a tiny newborn wrapped in a blanket, pulled from the wreckage of a building in Venezuela. His name was Juan David. He was just 18 days old. And his mother told the BBC that he motivated her to survive.
That image stuck with me for days. Not because I’m a parent. Not because I’m especially emotional. But because it captured something I’ve only ever felt on the road — the raw, unfiltered power of human will.
Travel does that. It strips away the comfortable distance we keep from tragedy. You can’t just swipe past a story when you’re in the same continent, breathing the same air, drinking coffee from a tin cup while a mother two hundred miles away is clinging to life for her child.
What a baby taught me about visiting Venezuela
Venezuela isn’t on most people’s travel lists right now. The economy’s a mess. The politics