6Sense

Author: Jimena Inda Martin

What London Teaches Newcomers About Touch

How touch changes within a new city

Crosswalk. Image: Unsplash

As an international student from Madrid now studying in London, I have felt firsthand how relationships and connections change in a new city. When I first arrived, academic support was essential. It helped me enrol, choose classes, and stay on track, but what I truly needed went beyond academics. I needed personal support, someone who understood the small, everyday confusions of adapting to a new culture and the quiet moments when the familiar warmth of home suddenly felt far away. But most of all, I needed a hug.

For those arriving from warmer climates, the first jolt often comes with the sharp breeze rushing from the aircraft doors, a cold that cuts through summer clothes and foreshadows wider adjustments. For international students, it is the opening signal that familiar habits of closeness and gesture will need rethinking.

Gregorio Vanacore. Image: Gregorio Vanacore

Gregorio Vanacore, a 23-year-old freelancer, felt it through his arrival at his university in London, coming from the town of Lucca in Tuscany. At Imperial College London’s orientation, amid the hum of arrivals in a large hall, Gregorio leaned in to greet a classmate with the double cheek kiss customary in Italy. The other student gave a brief nod and stepped back half a pace, leaving a space where contact was expected. The exchange passed without remark, but it stayed with him.

Later, in a seminar room lit by overhead strips and filled with projected slides, Gregorio reached out mid-discussion to touch a fellow student’s arm, a natural emphasis in Italy. The student stiffened for a split second, then carried on as though nothing had happened.

“In Italy, physical contact is automatic,” Gregorio says. “You greet people with kisses on the cheek, you touch someone’s arm whilst you talk. Here, I became very aware of my body and how close it was to others.”

On the packed Central Line at rush hour, passengers stood shoulder to shoulder but kept their gazes averted, on phones, papers, or nothing at all. Gregorio found himself inches from a woman reading a paperback, near enough to see the page number, yet the distance between them felt vast. He wasn’t used to so much distance. Back home in Lucca, the buses were local, and people would speak to each other more.

“At first, I thought people were being distant because they didn’t like me,” he says. “It took time to understand that distance here is a form of politeness.”

Mathilde Serrano arrived from Madrid and Nicosia with similar instincts. In her first class at Istituto Marangoni, she opened her arms to hug a Cypriot classmate who entered. The classmate smiled warmly and gave a small wave, hands remaining at her sides. Mathilde lowered her arms, cheeks warming.

Mathilde Serrano and a Cypriot classmate. Image: Mathilde Serrano

“In Spain and Cyprus, touch is emotional,” she says. “You hug when you greet someone, you sit close, you speak with your hands. In London, I felt like I had to hold myself back.” Matilde’s Cypriot classmate, who had lived here for some years, represented how a city can alter how you are, even having roots for a warmer touch.

One rainy evening on the Underground, the train swayed, and bodies brushed briefly. A man’s elbow grazed Mathilde’s; he muttered “sorry” without looking up, then shifted slightly away. Nearby, two people talked in low voices, heads inclined, but bodies separate, no nudge, no tap. “Everyone is pressed together,” she notes, “but it feels very lonely. No one looks at each other. It’s like there’s an invisible agreement to keep to yourself.”

Friendships developed slowly for Gregorio, with one of his British classmates suggesting coffee. They sat across from each other at Pret, talking for an hour about modules and football. No arm over a shoulder, no leaning in. But when Gregorio mentioned missing his mother’s ragù, the classmate listened closely. Weeks later came a text: “Found a decent Italian place near campus if you fancy it sometime.”

“With my Italian friends, touch happens immediately,” Gregorio says. “Here, closeness builds through talking, spending time together, and being consistent. I had to learn that affection doesn’t always look the same.”

Mathilde noticed quieter signs. Her flatmate left her favourite herbal tea on the counter after a long day. A lecturer, on their second seminar, asked by name how her weekend photography project had gone. No hugs or kisses, just small, steady gestures that built over time.

“I stopped using touch as a measure of how close I was to someone,” she says. “In London, care shows up in different ways, like people remembering things about you, checking in, giving you space, and letting you dress and show up how you like.”

Months on, Gregorio began pausing before reaching out, reading the room. One evening, after a group presentation, an Italian friend gave him a quick hug; he returned it, glanced around, and no one batted an eyelid. His shoulders dropped.

“Now I move between cultures more easily,” he says. “I know when touch is welcome and when it’s not.”

Mathilde found herself lingering in conversations, at ease with silences that once felt awkward. “I haven’t lost who I am, I’ve just added something to it.”

“Students come back having learnt many things, like living alone, doing their own laundry, and much more,” says Sofia Goya of International Educational Consultants (IEC), a company that helps guide international students in UK universities. “But the most important lessons are the communication skills they develop. They learn how to deal with all kinds of people, whereas back home you usually interact with only one culture and assume everyone responds the same way.”

Sofia Goya and Amy Vincent, Spain and Portugal representatives of IEC. Image: Sofia Goya

Organisations such as IEC encounter these patterns often and see themselves as more than academic advisers. “Apart from academics, we also play a role in the lives of these people in these cities,” Goya says. “Our role is very important for their progress, not only academically, but also personally and emotionally, because we know there are differences that come along with changing countries.”

Gregorio adds, “Many students describe warmth back home as gathering for tapas at 7 pm on a random Wednesday, surrounded by people talking and overlapping. In cities like London, they often discover a different kind of warmth. It is diverse and open-minded, creating a sense of mental closeness, a feeling of refuge.”

In the end, London’s intimacy often resides in the spaces it preserves: the empty seat left on a crowded bench, the nod exchanged across a busy platform, the quiet text that arrives just when it is needed. For Gregorio, Mathilde, and many others, myself included, the city is more than lectures and libraries. It is evidence that connection can flourish in restraint, in distance, in the unspoken decision to let someone simply be.

25 February 2026
The Scent of Self: Inside London’s Most Personal Refinery

In a studio tucked away in the streets of Notting Hill, Lucy Heale is doing something quietly radical. She is teaching people that the most powerful fragrance they will ever wear is the one they make themselves.

There is a moment that happens in every workshop at The London Refinery. It is the moment when someone lifts a strip of testing paper to their nose, closes their eyes, and goes somewhere else entirely. Maybe it is a childhood garden, a lover’s bedroom, or a grandmother’s kitchen. In that instant, fragrance stops being a product and becomes something far more intimate: a portal.

Lucy Heale, the founder of The London Refinery, has built her entire business around that moment. Since launching in 2019, after winning a university competition at Central Saint Martins and turning down a perfectly good job at a digital marketing agency to do so, she has been quietly redefining what it means to wear a scent.

Lucy Heale preparing a workshop. Image: Lucy Heale

“Fragrance is not just about smelling good,” she says. “It is about understanding where it comes from and how it is made.”

Of all the ways we construct identity, scent may be the most underestimated. It does not hang on a wall or sit in a wardrobe. It moves with you, invisible, intimate, and neurologically speaking, more deeply wired into who you are than almost anything else you wear.

We have always known this, in some sense. Perfume has been traded, gifted, inherited, and mourned for thousands of years. People keep empty bottles long after the scent is gone. They describe the smell of a lost person the way they might describe a face. They recognise themselves, sometimes startlingly, in the scent of a room they have not entered since childhood.

What is newer is the growing desire to reverse the transaction. Not to choose a scent off a shelf, but to make one. To sit with raw materials and arrive, through something between instinct and memory and experimentation, at something that feels genuinely, specifically yours.

The London Refinery’s workshop. Image: Lucy Heale

The London Refinery’s workshops last two hours. There are no formulas to follow, no prescriptions. Instead, participants work through a palette of natural essential oils, most sourced from small producers in the south of France, following what they are drawn to rather than what they think they should want.

What emerges is rarely what people expect. Someone who arrives certain they want something floral often finds themselves reaching for something greener, earthier, more austere. Someone who thinks they want warmth discovers they actually want stillness. The process has a way of surfacing preferences people did not know they had, and preferences, it turns out, are a kind of self-knowledge.

“Your scent becomes an extension of your identity,” Heale says. “It is not something imposed on you. It is something you have shaped with intention.”

That distinction matters more than it might seem. Most of us wear scents chosen for us by market research, celebrity association, or the ambient pressure of a department store counter. The fragrance we end up with is rarely a reflection of who we actually are. It is a reflection of what we were presented with on the day we needed to buy something.

The act of making, by contrast, requires a different kind of attention. It slows you down. It asks you to be specific about what you actually respond to, and why. In this sense, the workshop format sits at the intersection of craft and self-inquiry, and the two hours people spend at a blending table often function as something closer to reflection than shopping.

That insistence on knowing what you are working with extends to the materials themselves. The fragrance industry has long operated behind a veil of deliberate opacity: ingredient lists that tell you almost nothing, supply chains that stretch across continents without scrutiny, synthetic compounds that approximate nature without coming from it. Heale works against this. The oils used in her studio are natural, largely European in origin, and free from petrochemicals, parabens, and pesticide-treated botanicals. Every ingredient is tested for skin safety, because natural, it turns out, does not automatically mean gentle.

She is candid about the limitations this creates. Natural scents can be softer, less immediately arresting than their synthetic counterparts, built as those often are for projection and longevity over subtlety. Some workshop materials, certain metals, and crystals used in the process, resist fully sustainable solutions. Heale makes the most responsible choices available and does not pretend otherwise when the ideal is out of reach. Something is clarifying about that honesty. It treats sustainability not as a marketing position but as an ongoing negotiation with the actual conditions of making things.

Knowing where your materials come from also, it turns out, changes the experience of working with them. When you understand that the lavender in your blend grew in a specific region, harvested in a particular season, the act of choosing it becomes something more than aesthetic preference. It becomes a small act of connection to a place and a process. The finished scent carries that with it.

The London Refinery’s workshop. Image: Lucy Heale

Scent is also uniquely a memory technology. Of all the senses, smell has the most direct neurological connection to the limbic system, the part of the brain that processes emotion and memory. This is why a particular combination of notes can drop you into a specific afternoon twenty years ago with a precision that neither sound nor image can match. It is also why the fragrances people create in workshops so often have a retrospective quality: they are reaching, frequently without realising it, for something they already know.

One of the most striking examples of this at The London Refinery involved a woman who came in not to create something new but to recover something lost. She brought her late dog’s lead, his blankets, his coats, and anything that still held traces of his scent. She wanted something that could carry the memory of their walks together through the Cotswolds: cold and strong, she said, but also wintery, even though the walks had been in summer. The finished blend used woody, earthy notes for that familiar solidity; cool green herbs for the open air; soft musky undertones for the feeling of closeness. It was, in a very precise sense, a portrait. Not of a place, but of a relationship.

There is something in that story that speaks to a broader shift in how people relate to objects and experiences. The appetite for the meaningful over the merely good, for the traceable over the generic, has quietly reorganised how a generation consumes. In fragrance, as elsewhere, it has produced a growing scepticism toward the mass-produced and a corresponding interest in the natural, the artisanal, and the personal.

The workshops also do something harder to account for in any framework of individual identity: they create community. Strangers who come in separately often find themselves bonding over the shared vulnerability of the process, of not knowing what they are doing and trying anyway. Friendships form during sessions. People return together. There is something about the shared intimacy of working with materials that are, literally, about how you want to be sensed by others, that seems to lower the usual defences.

In this way, the making of a personal scent becomes a social act as much as a private one. You are deciding, in a room with other people, who you want to be. The answer you arrive at is yours alone, and yet the process of arriving at it is collective.

What you leave with is a small bottle of something that smells, if the session has gone well, unmistakably like you. Not a version of you that a brand has decided to offer. Not a compromise with what was available. Something that started as an intuition and ended as an object. An identity, briefly and precisely bottled.

25 February 2026
Above the Clouds: Where Instinct and Training Align

In the cockpit, Nicolás Pescador is learning that intuition can be as vital as training.

Every time a plane takes off, more is at play than instruments and checklists. Beyond weather reports, procedures, and technology, pilots rely on something less visible but equally vital: intuition. When conditions shift, and decisions must be made in seconds, it is often this internal compass that guides their actions, operating quietly alongside the measured logic of aviation systems. A study in Human Factors found that experienced pilots made faster, more accurate decisions than novices by noticing subtle cues that signalled problems, showing that cockpit “intuition” is built on trained perception, not guesswork.

Nicolás Pescador. Image: Fly School Air Academy Madrid

For Nicolás Pescador, 23, a trainee commercial pilot taking his second year at Fly School Air Academy in Madrid, intuition has already proven indispensable. He does not speak of heroics or near misses, nor does he frame his experiences as exceptional. Instead, he chooses his words carefully, almost as if naming the experience too loudly might diminish its meaning.

“It was during a routine simulator session,” he recalls. “The aircraft was stable, autopilot engaged. Everything was reading green. But as we descended through a thick layer of cloud, a sense of unease crept in.”

He pauses, searching for precision rather than drama. “Nothing was technically wrong,” he says. “But something didn’t feel right.”

Trusting that feeling, he disengaged the autopilot and adjusted the flight path manually. Moments later, a wind shear warning triggered a sudden, dangerous shift in wind speed or direction that can make landing unsafe if not addressed immediately. Had he hesitated, the landing could have become hazardous.

The story has the shape of a cinematic moment, but Pescador treats it as something quieter and instructive. For him, it is evidence that flying is not purely mechanical. “We are trained for every scenario,” he says. “But sometimes instinct leads before calculation has time to catch up. It’s subtle. Almost invisible if you don’t know what to look for.”

He reflects further on that sensation: “It was like a tightening in my chest, a micro‑alert that something in the environment wasn’t matching the data. In the simulator, I had no real danger, but the feeling is exactly what would guide me in the air. It’s a warning before the instruments can show it.”

Commercial pilot certification typically requires a minimum of 1,500 flight hours, much of it in simulators designed to replicate high-stress and emergency conditions. For trainees, these hours are not simply a regulatory threshold. They are a process of immersion and repetition, through which the aircraft becomes familiar not just as a machine but as a responsive system.

Those hours cultivate an almost subconscious understanding of flight: the vibrations transmitted through the controls, the way the aircraft responds to different air masses, and the small changes that signal larger shifts ahead. Over time, reaction becomes anticipation.

Training plane. Image: Unsplash

Early training, Pescador explains, is as much about avoidance as reaction. In summer, student pilots are taught to steer clear of areas with strong thermal activity, rising columns of warm air that can destabilise flight. “In hot weather, there are many thermals and birds,” he notes. “They create instability, so we try to avoid those zones.”

Timing is another variable drilled into students from the outset. Training flights are often scheduled for early morning, when the air is calmer and winds are lighter. “By midday, in both winter and summer, turbulence increases,” he says. “The atmosphere becomes much more unstable.”

Certain conditions demand strict discipline rather than instinct. “When there is fog, you fly purely by instruments,” he explains. “You cannot trust your senses.” That principle, known as instrument flight discipline, is rehearsed repeatedly until it becomes automatic, a safeguard against disorientation caused by visual illusions.

Other environments demand heightened physical awareness. Flying over mountainous terrain introduces a particular risk. “You get mountain waves,” he says, describing the way wind is forced up and down by the landscape, creating strong vertical air movement. “You can feel the aircraft rise and fall sharply. It’s something you must anticipate rather than react to.”

Psychologists describe what pilots call intuition as rapid cognition developed through repetition and experience. Ana Jiménez, who has studied decision-making under pressure, says the phenomenon is often misunderstood. “What feels like instinct is actually the brain processing hundreds of small cues almost instantly,” she explains. “Pilots are reading the aircraft and the environment on a level most people never experience.”

Jiménez stresses that intuition does not replace procedure. “It complements it,” she says. “It allows a pilot to act when there isn’t time to consciously gather and analyse every piece of information.”

“In high-speed environments, delayed decision-making can be as dangerous as incorrect judgement,” Jiménez explains.

As experience grows, the boundary between training and instinct begins to blur. Pescador describes moments when he has sensed subtle changes in wind pressure or vibration through the controls, cues too delicate to appear on any display. “You learn to trust that feeling,” he says. “Ignoring it can be costly.”

Modern pilots operate under significant pressure. Airlines demand efficiency, precision, and constant readiness. Long-haul pilots may spend much of their lives away from home, while trainee pilots often face financial strain even before securing stable employment. Fatigue, stress, and cognitive overload are part of the profession. Yet despite increasing automation, the human mind remains central to safe flight.

Autopilot systems and artificial intelligence now handle much of what was once done manually, Jiménez notes, but they do not replace judgment. “Machines follow algorithms,” she says. “They don’t feel the aircraft or sense subtle environmental changes. When seconds matter, it is often experience, what we label intuition, that makes the difference.”

Nicolás Pescador training. Image: Nicolás Pescador

Pescador is uninterested in dramatising these moments. He speaks of vigilance, observation, and patience. Mastery, for him, is not measured solely in logged hours or technical knowledge, but in presence: the ability to remain attuned to what the aircraft is doing and what it might do next.

“The instruments tell you what is happening. Intuition tells you what could happen,” Pescador says.

For passengers, a flight may feel serene, even effortless. Behind the cockpit door, however, there is a constant negotiation between procedure and perception, technology and human awareness. For pilots like Pescador, intuition is not an optional extra. It is an essential skill, quietly woven into every adjustment that keeps an aircraft and everyone on board safely aloft.

25 February 2026
A Breakfast That Matters: Inside Madrid’s Morning Service for the Homeless

“As a child of God, my mission on earth is to lend a hand to those most in need,” says Cristina Martin, a volunteer at Cachito de Cielo. The name translates to a small piece of heaven, giving sense to their cause: serving a warm breakfast every morning to those in need. Founded by a group of religious missionaries and nestled in the heart of Madrid, the charity is guided by the belief that “God does not abandon anyone; he walks with all of us”.

Through this conviction, Cachito de Cielo provides both material and spiritual support to some of the city’s most vulnerable residents, turning everyday acts of care into moments of hope.

In many societies today, a university degree or a steady job is no longer a guarantee against hardship. In Madrid, about 26% of the resident population was at risk of poverty or social exclusion (AROPE rate) in 2025, according to El País. Hunger queues, once a sign of acute crises, have become a quiet fixture in the city’s early mornings.

At Cachito de Cielo, rising living costs and economic pressures have reshaped daily routines. Where families once gathered inside a modest social dining room, they now wait outside while 10 to 20 volunteers prepare and hand out breakfasts from within. One of the sisters leading the organisation puts it simply: their doors remain open, in spirit if not always in practice, to anyone who is struggling.

Every day, from ten until late morning, the doors open to anyone, regardless of race, culture, or religion. Inside, a small team of volunteers works steadily, preparing breakfast bags filled with sweet and savoury items, passing them through the doorway.

Beyond these visible, frontline efforts, there is also a network of volunteers working quietly behind the scenes to make each morning possible. One of them is Cristina Martin, a 50-year-old mother, who is responsible for collecting donated food. “It takes me around 30 minutes to get from my house to the bakery,” she explains. “When I arrive, I collect and pack all the boxes of food they give me and then take them to the food bank. In total, I dedicate about an hour of my mornings to this very special cause.”

Martin’s contribution goes far beyond the simple act of transport. For the past five years, she has woven this responsibility into her daily routine, arriving at Pastelería Mallorca early each morning to collect freshly baked goods. Rain or cold rarely deters her; the timely arrival of the food shapes the day for the people waiting at the charity, and she is determined to play her part. On some mornings, she brings her two children, aged seven and nine, along before taking them to school. “I want them to see the reality of life,” she explains. “It’s an act of consciousness, so they understand how fortunate we are and why helping others matters.”

Her dedication comes with personal trade-offs. “Sometimes I miss my Pilates class,” she admits, “but seeing the volunteers in action and knowing the people we help makes it worth it. I make time for exercise later, it’s just shifted in the day.”

Once the boxes arrive at Cachito de Cielo, other volunteers unpack, sort, and prepare the contents for distribution. Inside the cardboard boxes is a varied selection, ranging from simple pastries to hearty sandwiches, all donated by Pastelería Mallorca, one of Madrid’s most celebrated artisan bakeries. Cristina hands the boxes to Miguel, who sorts the sandwiches and pastries into individual bags, while Ana checks the drinks and ensures a balanced mix. Then Laura and Javier take the prepared bags to the distribution point, where Sofia greets recipients with a warm smile and hands them their breakfast.

For Cristina, this daily journey is not about recognition but about consistency. On the way to school, after helping with the cause, her children chat about the families they saw and the sandwiches they packed, small gestures that show they are learning empathy by seeing their mother’s commitment in action.

Cristina Martin. Image: Cristina Martin

In Madrid, several organisations work with the Red Cross to ensure that no one goes hungry. The Banco de Alimentos de Madrid channels donate food to local charities and community centres, while Cáritas Diocesana de Madrid runs food points that provide families with essential packs and support. Yet, people keep returning to Cachito de Cielo, drawn by its exclusive partnership with Pastelería Mallorca, where the food’s consistently high quality sets it apart. Founded in 1931, Pastelería Mallorca first earned acclaim for its freshly baked ensaimadas, light spiral pastries, and torteles, sweet dough treats often filled with cream or jam, both staples of Spanish baking. Today, it has grown across Madrid, offering an array of pastries, chocolates, and gourmet products, all made daily in its own production kitchens (known in Spanish as obradores), where bakers and pastry chefs prepare the products on site.

A recent advancement made by the charity has been the preparation of additional takeaway “goodie bags”, ensuring no food goes unused and that recipients have something to sustain themselves throughout the rest of the day. These bags usually include a mix of pastries, sandwiches, or bread, along with essential liquids such as milk, water, and juices, all thoughtfully packed to be easy to carry and consume throughout the day.

Goodie bags. Image: Jimena Inda

Preparation of goodie bags. Image: Jimena Inda

For many people, this gesture provides more than just nourishment; it offers reassurance and dignity, allowing them to face the hours ahead without worrying about their next meal.

“I really appreciate what they do here,” says José Miguel, a 25-year-old carpenter. “I take one of these goodie bags to work every day. It keeps me going through long shifts and gives me peace of mind knowing I won’t have to skip a meal.”

As Sister Rosa María Ateza, who oversees the charity’s social outreach work, stresses, the situation is becoming increasingly severe, with the need for support greater than ever. “Many of the people who come to us are living on the streets,” she says. “When that is your reality, there can be no filters or conditions. We do not ask questions or turn anyone away. If someone is hungry and asks for food, they are welcome here.”

Beyond the charity itself, Madrid faces a growing social challenge. According to the European Anti‑Poverty Network (EAPN) and data from the Spanish National Statistics Institute, around 1.46 million people in the Community of Madrid — roughly 21 per cent of the population — are at risk of poverty or social exclusion, a figure that has risen over the past year. More than 320,000 children, about 31 per cent of the region’s minors, live in this situation, while nearly 42 per cent of families report struggling to make ends meet, as reported by EAPNMadrid and Diario de Madrid. These figures are striking, given that Madrid is one of the wealthiest regions in Spain, highlighting deepening inequality and the structural nature of poverty that drives many to seek essential support such as food and shelter.

Rosa María is quick to downplay her own efforts. “What we are doing is nothing,” she says softly, “it’s the least that could be done for these people.” She paints a stark picture of the mornings faced by many who arrive at the centre. Some have spent the night sleeping on the street, while others, if they were fortunate, slept in a small room without heating. By the time they reach the food bank, they are often forced to queue in freezing temperatures, at times dropping as low as minus two, simply to receive something warm to eat.

For Rosa María, this work is inseparable from her faith. She speaks of her union with God as the source of her commitment and of the gratitude she feels each day for the basic comforts she has, comforts she knows are absent for many of those who wait quietly in front of her.

However, she is careful to stress that this work is not about feeling sorry for anyone. As she explains, “We don’t have to feel sorry; these people are equal to us.” They are not objects of pity, but people who deserve empathy, respect, and to be treated in the best way possible. When they are approached in this way, those queuing in line respond positively, engaging more openly because they feel recognised as equals.

It is within this context that many volunteers find their way to the charity, their own life experiences often mirroring those of the people they now support. Marta Tornos, 55, moves with quiet purpose between the tables at Cachito de Cielo, passing out breakfast bags with a warm smile and a few words of encouragement for each person who arrives. She folds sandwiches neatly, checks the drinks, and makes sure nothing is overlooked. There is a calm efficiency to her movements, the kind that comes from years of practice and genuine care.

What makes her presence here remarkable, however, is a truth she does not often share: a little over a decade ago, she was one of the people standing in this very queue.

Marta had weathered the first wave of the Spanish financial crisis in 2008, keeping her role as an administrative assistant at a small manufacturing company in Madrid. By 2009, however, the company could no longer cope with falling orders and unpaid clients. She was called into the office and told that her post had been eliminated. “For a whole year, I felt like I had been saved, like I had made it through the worst. And then suddenly, everything fell apart. You never really know how hard it can hit until it happens to you,” she recalls. Bills piled up, savings dwindled, and even necessities became a struggle. Eventually, she found herself queuing for breakfast at the charity, a humbling experience she could never have imagined.

“That hardship is what drives me now to help others facing similar struggles, offering both meals and hope,” Marta explains. “Today I am one of the volunteers here, but there was a time when I was one of those people standing in line after losing my job. With God’s guidance, I found my way again, and that is why I am here helping others.”

At Cachito de Cielo, breakfast is more than just a meal. It is a taste of dignity, a moment of human connection, and a quiet reminder for both those who serve and those who receive that no one is truly alone. As Marta concludes the interview, she adds softly, “You never know when you might find yourself standing in that line.”

11 February 2026