They were born on 13 August 2018 at the Federal Medical Centre in Keffi, Nasarawa State, by caesarean section. Prenatal scans had shown twins. They had not shown that the girls were joined face to face from chest to belly. Their parents, Michael Edeh Martins, a painter, and Mariah (Maria) Martins, living in a one-room home in Mararaba with an older daughter, named them Goodness and Mercy and were sent the next day to National Hospital, Abuja. The family paid nothing. The hospital treated the case as public duty.

The twins shared a liver, the lower chest wall, the diaphragm and the pericardium — the sac around two separate, working hearts. They also had an omphalocele: bowel sitting outside the navel. That was closed first. For fifteen months a team grew them, fed them, mapped the liver with imaging and practised the cut. Professor Emmanuel Ameh, consultant paediatric surgeon, led 78 people — paediatric, plastic and cardiothoracic surgeons, anaesthetists, nurses, radiologists, haematologists — through more than twelve hours on 14 November 2019. They divided the liver, reconstructed vessels, closed two chests and two abdomens. Both girls lived. Six weeks later they were well enough to leave. Discharge came in January 2020, after about sixteen months in hospital. The health minister attended. Mariah was offered a hospital job. Ameh said this was the first successful Nigerian separation of twins joined at both chest and abdomen; earlier local cases had been abdomen only.

The Spanish caption’s “vaso sanguíneo en el corazón” overstates a shared pericardium as a single heart vessel. The hearts were two. The milestone is real enough without that flourish: a public hospital in Abuja did, free, what families in that position are usually told to seek abroad. The parents’ line after discharge was simpler than any press release. They were no longer a spectacle. They could hold one daughter in each arm.

Sources: Daily Trust feature “Separating Goodness and Mercy”; CNN Africa, 8 January 2020; Nigerian Tribune and Punch briefings with Prof. Emmanuel Ameh and CMD Dr. Jaf Momoh; The Guardian Nigeria interview with the Martins family.