Thursday, March 13, 2014
The counselor told me that if I liked reading I could write a diary about the days I spend here at the children’s home in Chicago. She gave me a notebook and a blue pen and told me to write my name on the first page. My age. And where I was from. So you don’t lose it, she said. Or so if you do lose it, people will know whose it is, so they can return it to you. She sat looking at me in silence, as if waiting for me to do something. I think she wanted to see if I really knew how to write. I opened the notebook and bent over the table. I wrote “Dylan” and my surname. “10 years old. Chalatenango, El Salvador.” Then she said that I can show her what I wrote, or I can keep it just for me. I can write whatever I want to: how I feel, the things that happened to me, anything at all. This is because I told her I like reading about things in the past. History. But I don’t know if I’m going to like writing about my own history.
They have a little library here with a few books in Spanish. I took out a book about the history of airplanes. Who invented them. The most important flights. Stuff like that. I also like books about sea creatures, but they don’t have any of those here.
I’d never been on a plane until they took me out of the freezer and sent me here. In the freezer, at five in the morning, they called out our names and put us on some buses. Those buses were done out like we were in a film. Like we were prisoners from a maximum-security jail, with bars on the window and everything. The girls sat up front and the boys in the back.
They took us to the airport, put us on a plane, and brought us here. It was an immigration plane that only had migrant kids on it. Girls in front and boys in the back. It was the first time any of us had been on a plane. There were kids like me, ten years old, or nine or eight. And other older ones: eleven, fourteen—there were even some who looked sixteen or seventeen. When the plane took off we all screamed. Some with excitement and others with fear. Just like when we landed.
When I’m older, maybe I can be a pilot.
Saturday 15
Here in the home, every day is more or less the same. We get up, we wash, we have English classes, we eat breakfast, and they let us play soccer or basketball, or we watch films, we eat lunch, and the ones who are best behaved are allowed to play video games. I still haven’t gotten to play any video games, though I don’t know why. We can go out into the yard if we want, but it’s cold, really cold. Even though they gave us all these thick overcoats. There are four beds in the room I sleep in. Every room has four beds. We also have to help make the beds and take the dirty washing to the laundry room.
Today I was allowed to speak to my mom on the phone. She told me not to worry, that she was going to send the papers they asked her for so that I could go live with her in Los Angeles. She said it would take a few days, because she had to get all the papers together and post them out. But she said to be calm, not to worry; she said it over and over. I know my mom’s voice really well and I can tell she’s worried. You could hear she was about to start crying. Her voice is the only thing I know really well. I’ve known my mom’s voice since I was very little, but only her voice, because when she went to the United States I was only six months old. Maybe they’ll let me go and live with her if they know that I’ve never met her. That I only know her voice. That’s not normal.
In the afternoon, we played a game of soccer. The kids from El Salvador against the kids from Guatemala. We won 4–1. The Guatemalan kids are really bad.
Sunday 16
In the morning when I was getting dressed, some of the kids looked at me and saw my burns. They started asking what had happened to me. I didn’t want to tell them, because I don’t like being pitied. But they kept on asking until I had to tell them. It all happened at school, back home in Chalatenango. There were these kids who would beat me up, every day, and that’s why I didn’t like going to school. They were a year older than me. I don’t know why they attacked me, they didn’t say, they just did it. I’d go and tell the teacher and the teachers didn’t care, they didn’t do anything—it was a real problem. They beat up some friends of mine, too. Sometimes we’d say that we ought to defend ourselves, hit them back, but I didn’t want to because I didn’t want to end up getting more hurt. I was scared. I was really scared.
School was from seven in the morning until noon. At nine o’clock it was recess. And one day I was playing hide-and-seek at recess and when I went around the back of the school to look for a friend they were waiting for me. There were four of them. They had a hot piece of tubing with them. They’d gone to heat it up in one of their houses, one who lived near the school. It was a plastic tube, all melted. They grabbed me and held it to my hand. And then on my arm. And my back. I ran away, all the way home. My grandma cleaned my wounds and took me to the doctor. They gave me some cream to rub on. And this big dressing. My grandma was tired of me being beaten up; she said she was tired of them hurting me so much. That’s why I came here.
Tuesday 18
I was talking to a bigger boy out in the yard, a kid from Guatemala. He must have been around fourteen, fifteen years old. We’d just had lunch and had gone outside to play, but we had to wait because there was a game going on between Mexico and Honduras.
The boy told me that he was in another home before this one, and in that one there were girls, too. He was laughing as he said it. But they had a rule in this other home that you always had to be at an arm’s length away from people. Unless you were playing a game or eating lunch or something, you couldn’t sit down with anyone close by because the caregiver would come by to check you weren’t doing anything wrong. The boy said that there were kids who got together with other girls or boys right there in the home, and so they had this rule to avoid any problems. And he laughed again—I think he must have had a girlfriend there. I was going to ask him, but I was too embarrassed.
Friday 21
Today it was freezing, and nobody wanted to go out into the yard. Everyone wanted to stay inside and play. Or watch TV. Or play video games. Today and yesterday I got to play video games. Suddenly someone came running over and shouted for us to all go out into the yard, quick, to come and see what was happening. We all ran out. Outside there was snow falling. I took off my gloves and stretched out my hands and turned my face up to the sky. I thought it would be like cotton, but when I touched it, it was just ice.
Saturday 22
In the morning we played by throwing snowballs at each other. It wasn’t snowing anymore, but lots of snow had fallen and it was so cold that it wouldn’t melt. If you kept your gloves on, they would get wet. If you took them off, the snow was so cold it made your hands hurt. It almost felt like the snow was burning.
Monday 24
Nobody’s telling me anything and I don’t know how long I’ll have to stay here. There are kids who’ve been here a long time—two months, eight months, some even a whole year. Those kids get sad and everyone else tries to cheer them up, says there’s still a chance they’ll get out of here. And they try to cheer up every person who does get out, telling them it’s going to turn out really well for them. I don’t know if they’ll send me to live with my mom in Los Angeles or send me back to my grandma in El Salvador. But my grandma can’t take care of me anymore, because my grandpa is seriously ill and in the hospital. That’s what my grandma told me, and she said I had to go.
They put me on a truck and I didn’t know where I was going. The truck took us to Guatemala, thirteen of us. There were adults and kids with their relatives. From Guatemala they took us to Mexico on a bus. They didn’t give us any food, but I wasn’t hungry because I was worried about what was happening. I was scared. I was scared because I didn’t know what was happening and I didn’t know where we were. My grandma didn’t really explain anything to me. I just overheard her say when she was talking to someone that she was praying to God that I wouldn’t have to walk through the desert. And praying that the Zetas didn’t catch me in Mexico, because when the Zetas catch kids you had to get money together to pay them off.
Once we were in Mexico they made us change buses to go to Monterrey. The bus didn’t stop the whole way to Monterrey. Then they took us to a house, but the house was full of mosquitos. There were more people there, more migrants. In the house, the men slept in the living room, on mattresses on the floor, and the women slept in the bedrooms. They gave us sandwiches and burritos to eat. One day Immigration came, and we had to hide. I had to hide in one of the bedrooms. The guy who opened the door told them there was nobody in there and they left.
Then they took us in a taxi to another house, a little house this time. Then they took us to the river in another truck. There were about seventeen of us in the trucks going to the river. We crossed over on a raft, a rowboat. They only had two boats to get people across, and there were about seven people in each boat. I was in the second group to go across. It was raining, kind of drizzling. It was nighttime. We walked for about half an hour until some trucks pulled up. Immigration caught us. They caught all of us.
They took us to an immigration center and locked us up in a freezer. It was just boys, although there were only four the same age as me. I spoke with an agent there. I only told them my name, but they searched my things and in my backpack my grandma had put a piece of paper with my mom’s phone number on it, and an aunt’s who also lives in the United States. I was in the freezer for three days.
Tuesday 25
The counselor told me what I’d written was really good. Said it was great that I’d written about the burns and about the time those other kids had beaten me up. That I was very brave for doing that. She asked me if I wanted to tell her anything else about it. That sometimes talking can make you feel better. I told her that they also used to hassle me outside school. The kids from the gangs. There were a few of them. Tall. They carried knives. They told me that if I didn’t join them by the time I was ten they’d kill me. And my friends. They’d say this to us in the street, after school. We were scared. We would run away to keep safe. My cousin had to change schools because there were boys hassling her.
My grandma said that the gangs had destroyed the country, that they’ve turned everything upside down. That people were abandoning villages, whole towns, leaving their crops and their animals behind to go somewhere else. And that people aren’t brave enough to talk about what’s happening in their communities. And that’s why I had to leave. Even though it was really dangerous. But, like they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Wednesday 26
The counselor told me that my case has been approved. That in a few days I could go and be with my mom, that they were going to put me on a plane to go be with her.
(We lost at soccer to the kids from Honduras. But we won against Mexico on penalties.)
Friday 28
I was woken early in the morning and told to get up and have a shower. Then they put me on a truck and took me on a train to the airport in Chicago. There were seven of us kids traveling together. At the airport we said goodbye to some of the others. Two who were going to New York and another one who was going to Carolina. The other four of us were going to Los Angeles. The flight was going to leave at seven thirty in the morning, but it was delayed and we just sat there. So while we were waiting, the person who was accompanying us called my mom to tell her about the delay and that she would have to pick me up at the airport later than we thought. It took us about three hours to get there—to me it felt like ages. But it was really cool getting onto the plane. When we arrived, I ran to the pick-up area, and that was when I saw my little brother, and my mom recognized me.
I just hugged her. I hugged her. I hugged her hard because I didn’t recognize her. I’d thought she was going to be taller.
My stepdad drove us from the airport to the house where we were going to live. Or where I was going to live from now on, because they all lived there already. My mom and my stepdad parked the car outside a really big building and said that we had arrived. “Wow,” I said, “my mom has this whole building?” All three of them burst out laughing. You say the funniest things, Dylan, said my mom.
They just live in one of the apartments.