Three-year-old Rahaf Saed wore a Belle princess costume over her chunky pink sweater and blue jeans. She scampered on her hands and one knee across the decorated living room toward a small pile of gifts, her empty pant legs trailing behind her.

She’s excited by the prospect of new toys, eager to play with other kids at her birthday party. She briefly squabbles with a new friend who snatched a toy from her. She immediately forgets the skirmish when handed a lollipop.

Her mom, Israa Saed, 30, tries to get Rahaf to wear her prosthetics -- the artificial right leg goes up to her hip and the left one attaches below her knee -- but Rahaf refuses. The prosthetics don’t have any bendable joints, so she can’t sit or get up easily in them.

Right now, she wants to sit directly in front of the white and pink sheet cake with three candles on it.

“Sing to me,” she urges the crowd of children and women surrounding her. This is the first time many of them, myself included, are meeting this spirited child, plucked from a ravaged war zone and delivered to St. Louis because of the catastrophic injuries she’s endured.

Her journey is rare. Since October 2023, America has allowed fewer than 100 critically wounded or sick children from Gaza into the country when aid organizations have offered to pay for their travel and medical care. An interpreter, the local Muslim community and Shriners Hospital are helping the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund, which brought Rahaf and Israa here.

Rahaf won’t talk about the day she lost her legs. Her mother recalls that moment on Aug. 1. She woke up to the sound of her baby screaming. An Israeli attack hit their home. Her 6-year-old son’s hand and face were bleeding, and Rahaf seemed to be floating in a lake of blood. Both of Israa’s arms were broken. There were no ambulances, so they rode in a car to one of the few hospitals still standing.

At al Aqsa Hospital, they spent an entire day waiting in a hallway. The place was packed with the wounded. Doctors amputated Rahaf’s right leg above the knee, and her left leg below it, to save her life.

When she saw herself after the surgery, Rahaf wailed.

She cried when she saw other children running nearby. She began wetting the bed again. When any visitor came to see her, she made her mother cover her legs. A journalist took a photo of this 2-year-old, who had lost her legs so soon after learning to run, jump and skip.

PCRF saw the photo and began negotiating to try to get Rahaf out of Gaza for treatment.

Lisa Doughten, a senior United Nations official, told the U.N. General Assembly in October that the Gaza Strip “is home to the largest cohort of child amputees in modern history.” Israeli attacks have killed more than 46,000 Palestinians since the war broke out, with nearly 70% of the victims being women and children. Thousands of children have lost their limbs.

To give her daughter a chance in St. Louis, Israa had to leave behind her two young sons, ages 6 and 8, in a place where children are starving and freezing to death.

When Rahaf heard she would be able to walk again, she asked to get her feet back. She gets an hour of therapy each day to learn how to navigate flat and uneven surfaces on the prosthetics.

“In Gaza, there are no flat surfaces left,” their interpreter said.

It’s jarring to live as a spectator to this: Half of my social media feeds are images of people’s destroyed homes, either in L.A. or Gaza, and the other half reflect the mundane concerns of those untouched -- in places where fires and bombings are someone else’s nightmare.

The United States spent $17.9 billion on military aid to Israel from October 2023 to October 2024. The guests at Rahaf’s birthday party must deal with the cognitive dissonance of knowing their tax dollars are funding the deaths and injuries of so many while trying to create a moment of joy for one of its victims.

The birthday girl is oblivious to these internal tensions. She is focused on taking a bite of a large slice of cake covered in frosting.

Her mother watches her daughter with a look of joy and longing. When she talks to her sons, they always ask when she and Rahaf are coming back. She’s not sure how soon they will return. Her wish on her baby’s birthday was that when they go back, the bombs and missiles will have stopped.

That one day soon, her children will have a safe place to grow up.

There wasn’t another living soul as far as she could see, in front of her or behind her, when Fatema Rangwala spotted the boulder perched over the glacier she had to cross.

The rest of the trekkers in her group had moved far ahead. They were still days away from the base camp of K2, the second-highest mountain in the world -- and the most dangerous.

Rangwala looked at the boulder balanced atop a peak and wondered if it would come tumbling down and crush her as she tried to pass under it. She sobbed as she trudged across the harsh, barren terrain -- cold, exhausted and alone.

What had drawn this 54-year-old Pakistani American mother of three on such an inexplicable adventure?

She has run a Kumon tutoring center in Clayton, Missouri, for more than three decades and is far more adept at coaching math facts than scaling mountains. In fact, she had never climbed a single mountain -- nor hiked for more than a couple of hours -- before embarking on this 20-day excursion toward K2's base camp, a destination 16,896 feet above sea level.

“It was not on my bucket list. I’d never even thought about it,” Rangwala, now 62, said.

One of her childhood friends was arranging a trekking trip for a group of Pakistani physicians from California, and she convinced three of her friends to join them. The adventure went far beyond what Rangwala could have imagined when she agreed to it.

Getting to the starting point required a treacherous eight-hour drive at night, in an open Jeep, cutting tight corners around steep ledges. There was no rescue or phone service along that route, where just days earlier, a bus had fallen over an edge. The group started out with 18 hikers, 40 sherpas and several horses, mules and goats. The day they arrived, an avalanche fell, bringing down camping gear and sleeping bags -- likely from unlucky visitors who had been buried under the snow.

They faced unpredictable weather and difficult, rocky terrain with the Indus River raging through the area surrounding the mountain. One night, a horse lost its footing and plunged to its death. One of the experienced trekkers didn’t use a hiking pole, and he slid and fell. He had to be carried away on a stretcher. Rangwala hiked eight to 12 hours a day and slept in a tent in below-freezing temperatures. The other women held a shawl around her for privacy when she had to use the restroom. They did not bathe for 14 days.

Every day, Rangwala said she faced numerous challenges that could have easily resulted in her death.

“After a while, you leave it up to God,” she said. “If you’re not supposed to make it, you’re not going to make it.”

“What am I leaving behind in this world?” she asked herself. Beyond her successful adult children and business, she wondered what her legacy would be.

As they got closer to the base camp, the weather worsened. A blizzard created whiteout conditions. Rangwala was nearly ready to give up when the skies cleared. On the last morning of their ascent, they could not get out of their tents because the zippers had frozen overnight. When they finally got to Concordia, she saw the entirety of the spectacular and savage mountain in front of her.

“You suddenly see it,” she said. “It was really stunning.”

The adventure pushed her beyond what she believed she was capable of doing.

Sometimes, we deliberately choose the path we want to travel. Other times, we go with the flow, and the path chooses us.

Rangwala made a poster about her trip for her Kumon students. She couldn’t resist sharing a lesson with them: No matter how daunting a task is at first, if taken one step at a time, it will surely lead to success, she wrote. More importantly, she told them, achieving one goal makes the next one easier to attain.

Three years later, Rangwala decided she wanted to trek to Everest's base camp. Her friends had no desire to repeat such an arduous experience.

So, at 57, she joined another expedition.

I met my 6-week-old nephew for the first time inside a silver Honda SUV parked in front of a weed shop.

I had been yearning to hold my newest nephew. I asked my sister-in-law, the lovely woman married to my youngest brother, to bring their baby to an airport in Houston where I had planned a two-hour layover. I knew she was on maternity leave and that they lived nearby.

I’ve thought a lot about the relationships between uncles and aunts with their nieces and nephews, probably because I’ve lucked out on both sides of that equation. This feels like the most uncomplicated family relationship. It’s so easy to love the children of our siblings: There’s a shared emotional bond without any of the baggage from having grown up competing for parental attention or household resources.

My brother is the youngest of six siblings, and I am the eldest -- we are separated by 16 years. When he was born, my parents had just opened a small business about 60 miles away from our home. During the summers, I was in charge of my five younger siblings, including the baby, from the early morning hours until my parents returned late at night.

My brother was born with complicated medical issues, and I understood the gravity of taking care of his needs. He became my primary responsibility when many of my peers were interested in partying and scoring joints. I didn’t resent it for a minute, though. Some people are baby people, and I knew from a young age that I was one of them.

He was a sweet and captivating baby. I have no memories of him crying or whining. Once, I carefully placed him on my bookshelf next to the stuffed animals and dolls and took a picture. He was indistinguishable from the toys surrounding him.

My own children are now young adults in college. Their babyhood seems like a magical blur. Given their generation's tendency to delay getting married and having children, becoming a grandparent seems like a far-off, hazy dream, still out of focus.

But one of the benefits of having so many younger siblings is a boatload of nieces and nephews.

It may seem silly that I inconvenienced my sister-in-law with my airport request since I would have met the baby a few weeks later, anyway, when we descended on my hometown for the holidays. But I think she knew how deeply I missed being there when he was born. I had met several of my other nieces and nephews very soon after their births, but this time, prior commitments prevented me from visiting sooner.

So when an opportunity arose in mid-November, I switched a direct, two-hour flight from another city to a six-hour connecting flight so I could stop in Houston and meet him. (I asked my sister-in-law before changing the flight.)

My baby cravings were that strong.

My sister-in-law happily obliged and picked me up from the airport. We drove to the nearest strip mall, since we didn’t have time to go anywhere else before I had to board my next plane. I put on a mask and doused my hands with Purell. She lifted the baby out of his car seat and placed him in my outstretched arms.

When I held him, I became a teenager again, holding my infant brother.

My brother was born with an immature epiglottis, which prevented him from breathing or swallowing on his own. He stayed in the hospital for a month. He had a tracheostomy, which allowed him to breathe, and came home with a g-tube that delivered formula directly to his stomach. Doctors predicted he would never breathe, eat or live on his own.

He grew up to become a doctor. He married another doctor. And now, the fragile baby of my childhood has his own robust child. One day, I will tell this child about his dad’s miraculous recovery.

When I cradled my nephew in my arms, I saw my youngest brother’s big brown eyes and "wizened old man" expressions. I held him in the backseat, feeding him a bottle of pumped breast milk, while patrons of the pot shop staggered in and out.

I took a deep inhale of his sweet baby smell.

All too soon, it was time to buckle him back into the car seat. The next time I see him, he will be 3 months old.

I caught a fleeting moment of his infancy in a surreal encounter.

It reminded me of the babies I have nurtured and loved, and of the immense beauty they bring into this broken world.