“We barely ate,” she remembered. “What we did was work.”

I met Olga in the sky-blue courtyard of an elementary school in Guatemala’s western highlands. The circumstances that put Olga where she is and me where I am are random, capricious and in many ways cruel. As a saying goes, “Talent is universal, but opportunity is not.”

We often call this the lottery of birth, but I worry that phrase doesn’t do Olga justice — or does too much to clear us of responsibility. A lottery is chance, but my good fortune and Olga’s misfortune are partly the results of policies in my country and hers. I also wonder if the term “lottery” legitimizes a kind of fatalism, even an indifference to those who draw the wrong ticket.

Olga’s ability to feed her family or go to school should not require winning the lottery. Those are human rights.

Olga doesn’t know exactly how her husband died last year. It was an accident of some sort. He was working on the Guatemalan coast, where they had met a few years before when she was there working with her family.

“We met and he told me, ‘I’ll take care of you, you won’t have to work,’” she told me.

But since his death, Olga is now the sole person responsible for their three daughters, ages 10, 8 and 5.