From heartbreak to hope

One minute Ayesha and Alex Demetriou were planning nursery colours. Next, they had to choose memorials.

On a bleak Tuesday – 12th November 2024 – Ayesha and Alex’s world came crashing down with five devastating words: “Sorry, there is no heartbeat.”

The vibrant dreams of welcoming identical twins into their British-Indian and Greek-Cypriot family dissolved instantly.

What was meant to be a new chapter of life turned into a passage of grief – a missed miscarriage, where the body keeps believing a baby is alive even when it’s not.

“This wasn’t the plan,” Ayesha writes, her voice raw and painfully honest. “It was supposed to be big weddings, loud dinners, lots of babies and happily ever after, right? Not funerals.”

The tragedy of miscarriage is often cloaked in silence, yet it touches one in four pregnancies. But Ayesha and Alex refused to let grief go quietly. Instead, through tears, they found purpose – and a powerful way to honour the lives of the babies they never got to hold.

“I’m going to run a 10k,” Alex declared one morning, his voice steady. “And build a well in India in their memory.”

Out of the brokenness of miscarriage, a mission was born – to bring clean water to children and families who’ve never known it.

The couple launched a fundraising page with a brave goal of £5,000, despite fearing that even £1,000 might be a stretch. But donations flooded in, smashing through the target and soaring past £6,000.

Their heartbreak has literally turned into life-giving water.

But it wasn’t an easy journey. “There was no help,” Ayesha writes, laying bare the shocking reality of NHS miscarriage policy: investigations often don’t begin until a woman suffers three miscarriages.

The couple turned to their faith.

… story continues