10/17/2025
Three Names. Three Heartbeats. One Impossible Choice.
Mimaëlle, Mimilove, and Migo were born on a hot, breathless day in Haiti. Triplets who filled their mother’s arms for less than a week before her heart gave out.
Postpartum cardiomyopathy: the kind of silent killer that doesn’t give warnings. She survived the birth, went home to her babies and four-year-old daughter. And then, suddenly, she was gone.
In Haiti, babies who lose their mothers are ten times more likely to die before their first birthday. Triplets face even longer odds.
The father brought the babies to Grann, their maternal grandmother. The woman who had raised the mother who just died. Now she was being asked to hold her daughter’s three newborns while her daughter lay in the ground.
She said yes.
Three babies and a four-year-old granddaughter. Sleepless nights, impossible logistics, and grief so fresh it must feel like drowning. She said yes anyway.
The head of Haiti’s Ministry of Health called us personally. So we showed up with diapers, formula, and pediatric care from Dr. Phélès.
Right now, Grann and the babies are at Kay Manman Yo, our maternal waiting home. They’re surrounded by other women, other families. The babies are being passed from arm to arm, sung to in Kreyòl, kept warm by community.
They’re not just statistics. They’re three lives being held by a grandmother who chose love in the face of unimaginable loss and a community that refused to let them fall.
This is what it looks like when systems fail but people don’t.
This is why Midwives for Haiti exists.
