When I woke up I was completely naked and I had an awful headache, and to this day, my head still hurts. They tell me I have a fracture in my head. They did an X-ray and there was a kind of crack in my skull. Every week I have an appointment with the neurologist who gives me medicine to control the pain in my head.
I picked up my clothes from where I’d thrown them on the floor and got dressed. Later, when I got home, I didn’t tell my mom anything. I spent nearly a year like that, crying every day, crying because of what had happened to me. My mom could see that I kept fainting all the time, I had bad headaches, and even my hair was falling out because of all the stress. I could barely sleep; I had nightmares all the time. I would dream about those people. This went on until one day I made up my mind and I told my mom what had happened to me, and I told her I didn’t want to live there anymore and that the people who had done those bad things to me were threatening me. My mom told my dad, and then he decided that I had to leave Honduras and come here, to New York, where he’s been living since 2004. This was in May 2014. I thought that life here would be safer and that nothing bad would happen to me, so I decided to come.
I left on a bus, and then from Mexico I took a train, La Bestia—that’s what they call the train—and one day I nearly fell off it. I was about to fall onto the tracks, but nothing happened, thank God. During the journey we went past all these good-hearted people. When the train stopped they’d come over and give us sandwiches, water. Sometimes they gave us chicken and tortillas.
The people I took the trip with were nice. We laughed together; we even laughed about when I nearly fell off the train: I was trying to climb up onto the freight car and I almost fell, and they all laughed, and so did I. And we laughed when my shoes fell apart: I’d walked so much they just broke.
I don’t know what I would have done without them. They really helped me; they saved me, though I’m not sure how. Some people tried to kidnap us in Mexico: they told us we had exactly one day to pay the toll, and if we didn’t pay, they’d blow off every single finger on our hands. When we took the train in Veracruz, that’s when the criminals got on. They had a Taser with them for shocking people. There were three of them, and two policemen with them as well. The policemen saw me fainting because I was scared, and they didn’t do anything. The police were working with the criminals. Before I passed out, I saw the thugs giving money to one of the policemen. They said that if we didn’t pay a bond we couldn’t stay on the train. We said we’d already paid it. But they made us get off and wouldn’t let us back on again.
That was in Orizaba. They made us get off the train and said they wouldn’t let us on again until they’d made sure that we’d paid. We went to a hotel and they came with us, and two of them stayed behind to make sure no one escaped. Then one of them tried to grab me to get the money we owed them. He said that he liked me and wanted the others to sell me as a trade-off. Another one dragged me over to where he was and hit me round the head with a gun. In the end I don’t know what happened or whether my friends had to pay more money, but after this they let us go and we got on a bus and went to Mexico City.
I don’t know if I’ve been unlucky to meet such bad people. There was a really horrible woman working in the freezer, too. When Immigration first stopped me, they sent me to a freezer and then I was transferred to another one in Nogales, Arizona. All they gave me there was a green mattress and a sort of aluminum blanket. Oh God, but there was a woman working there who was so mean—she told me I was a useless beggar. Just because I had grabbed a carton of juice and a peanut cracker, she told me I was a useless beggar. She said that all black people who come here are bums. And I replied: I’m black and proud.
Then when they sent me off to my dad’s I had to go to court to see if I could stay or if they were going to deport me. My dad never told me about this country, about what the United States was like, how the people live here—he just said that it was all work and study, work and study, work and study. My dad is a bus mechanic and now he’s married to another woman and he has other kids. When he came to pick me up from the airport, I didn’t believe it was him because he looked so different. I didn’t recognize him anymore.
In court they asked me lots of questions. They wanted to know what my life was like back in Honduras. I told them I’m from a little village, two hours from San Pedro Sula, that I lived there with my mom and my two little brothers. In Honduras I finished the twelve school grades, which is like graduating high school, I said. I liked to go to school, I told them; I was a good student.
On the weekends I helped my mom. We sold coconut bread on the beach. We walked along the beach selling it; we took a pana with us, which is like a basket you carry on your head. Back home in the village there’s a beach and lots of tourists come from San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa.
I also told them that I came over from Honduras in 2014; all I remember is that it was the month of May, I don’t recall the exact date it was when I left. I was sixteen.
And in court they wanted to know why I came, what the reason was for me coming to the United States. I had to tell them that lots of things had happened to me there. That I was sexually abused when I was walking home from school. I used to study for an hour in the village where I lived, and I was attacked when I was coming home from school because I’d stayed later than usual that day.
Everyone had gone home already, and so I had to walk almost half an hour to catch the bus and it was nearly dark, and I was alone, crossing an airfield that doesn’t get used anymore. I was just walking across it, and that’s where the bad people were waiting for me. There were three of them, and they punched me in the head, and to this day I suffer from headaches. I don’t know what happened afterward. I’d never walked that way before; I just did it because it was the fastest route to get the bus home.
“What do you think would happen if you went back to your country?” they asked me in court. “Are you afraid of going back?” I told them that I’m not as afraid as before, because I’d started going to church and that I had spoken to the pastor, and she told me to forget everything that had happened to me. I was beginning to forgive the people who did those things to me. And gradually I did forget. I was seeing a psychologist; I was forgetting about it all bit by bit. But in court, they wanted to know if I might still be in danger in case they were to deport me and I had to go and live in Honduras again. I told them that I was in danger, that the bad people who did those things to me had threatened me, and I said that if I told anyone what they’d done they would kill me, and I was terrified of this.
I hadn’t seen these bad people before, but after what happened, they were always hanging around outside my school, and that made me more afraid. Every day, when the bell rang and we all came out, they would drive past in a car. Whenever I got out early I would get straight onto the bus and I could see them driving past. Every time this happened I would hide under the seat on the bus. I recognized the car, the license plate, but I never reported it to the police. I never told the police anything because I was scared that they would kill me and my brothers and sisters, kill my family, because they told me they knew where I lived. That’s why I’m so afraid.
I also told them in court that sometimes I talk to my Honduran friends on Facebook. They tell me that last week the gang killed four people in the village where I used to live. Things are the same, my friends say; they go into the houses to steal. The burglars go into the house when you’re sleeping, give you a kind of powder that sends you into a deep sleep, and when you wake up, the house is empty as a ballroom.
In court they approved my case and now I’ve got my papers. Soon I’ll be able to apply for citizenship. I feel safer here: When I walk down the street I feel safe, no more worrying about bad people attacking me again. The only sad thing is that I really miss my family. My mom is in the hospital at the moment; she’s anemic and she’s been hospitalized for over two months. She’s got a bad heart and one day it stopped, and they had to revive her in the hospital. When I spoke on the phone with her, all she said was that she was not going to leave this world without seeing me again, that her dying wish was to see me again.
I’ve been studying English, but it’s been quite hard. Mainly because of my headaches. To this day my head still hurts. I was in the hospital here in Lincoln for almost three weeks for a really bad headache. But now my English has gotten better and in September I’m going to go to university. I have to do four years of a bachelor’s degree so I can be a lawyer. I’m so happy I’m going to university. It’s something I’ve always wanted, to be someone in life, to be an example for my brothers and sisters.
I had a dream.
I dreamed that I was defending people.
I was a human rights lawyer.
I’ve dreamed about that quite a few times.