I wanted to change not only the way I worked, but also where I worked. Africa and the Middle East were a priority for me. Other parts of Asia, maybe. Latin America? An opportunity came up to go to Mexico with EFE. Just as I was about to leave, I saw a job posting from Doctors Without Borders that involved constant travel to humanitarian emergencies. I applied and they hired me — I still wonder why. I was 29, and I opened a new chapter in my life in which I no longer published news in a media outlet, but instead followed humanitarian teams and traveled to countries such as South Sudan, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria, the Philippines, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Mexico…

I learned how a top-tier humanitarian organization worked. My sense of solidarity came alive. I connected cultures and political systems. I met the person who would become my partner in travel and in life, the photographer Anna Surinyach. I focused on something I had been covering from the beginning: movements of population, and especially people fleeing conflict. I traveled and told those stories many times with Surinyach. She took the pictures, I wrote the stories. I defended my PhD thesis on Tagore in Barcelona. I boarded rescue boats of Doctors Without Borders in the Mediterranean Sea.

But I missed the excitement of journalistic reporting — writing for the media. I decided I needed another change. What if this time I didn’t depend on a news outlet or a humanitarian organization? What if this time I could change the rules of how and where stories are told? What if this time I had my own project, together with other colleagues?