Before she saw the cat, Hannah Shaw heard her scream. It wasn’t a pained scream, but a terrified one.

Shaw, the creator of Kitten Lady, was on holiday in Peru with her boyfriend, cat photographer Andrew Marttila, and they’d just returned from climbing across the Andes and visited Machu Picchu. On the penultimate day of their journey, the last thing they anticipated was to savе a cat.

Shaw, on the other hand, ran toward the kitten’s scream as they strolled through a nearby neighborhood.

“I noticed a small child, maybe 6 years old, racing around with a cat in his hands,” Shaw explained. “The child wasn’t being cruel to the cat; in fact, he was overjoyed, but he was clutching her tightly. So I began chasing him down and yelled, “Hey, hey, let me try to assist this kitty.””

Shaw, who works as “Kitten Lady” and spends most of her time nurturing and nursing young kittens, wasn’t the right person for the job.

The kitten was tiny and white-furred, and she was trembling. But once the kitten was in Shaw’s arms, she started to calm down.

“I think she recognized that we were helping her,” Shaw said.

But Munay, the kitten, was still in bad shape: she was underweight and emaciated, and her dirty fur was strewn with fleas. Shaw had been carrying about some cat food, which she presented to the kitten, who gobbled it right away.

Shaw discovered from the youngsters, who spoke to him in limited Spanish, that Munay didn’t have a mother and that the kids had stolen her from another part of town.

“They didn’t have a plan for her,” Shaw explained, “and there was nowhere safe for her to go.”

Shaw wanted to assist more, but she and Marttila were leaving in 45 minutes on a train and wouldn’t be back. They were actually returning to the United States the next day. Shaw, on the other hand, couldn’t leave Munay there, so she did the only reasonable thing she could think of: she took Munay with her.

The next 48 hours were pure craziness for Shaw and Marttila. First, they had to smuggle Munay onto the train. Then they had to figure out how to get Munay onto their two flights and get the kitten into the U.S.