Alexis González walks slowly and with some hesitation, using the outside wall of his house for balance...
Alexis González walks slowly and with some hesitation, using the outside wall of his house for balance.
"I'm
getting used to the prosthesis," the 16-year-old says. He tries to
smile, but an expression of sadness quickly returns to his face.
When
he was 15, González made a decision that would forever change his life
-- to leave Omoa, an impoverished village in Honduras -- with dreams of
getting to the United States.
At the
end of the trek -- about 2,500 kilometers (1,500 miles) across Mexico
and Guatemala -- he saw hope, school, a job and the chance to send money
home.
"Sometimes we don't even have food to eat and I also wanted to get a higher education," González says.
His
mother was singlehandedly raising nine children, working odd jobs in
restaurants and the nearby fields. They lived in a single room, an adobe
house with dirt floors built on a steep and muddy hill. Chickens being
raised for food roamed around the structure. González says his father
left the family when he was little boy.
When
Gonzalez left in January 2014, he didn't ask his mother for permission.
He only left a letter telling her about his plans. "I wouldn't have let
him go," his mother Mercedes Meléndez says. "When he left I went
looking for him everywhere." She even went to Corinto on the
Honduras-Guatemala border to ask authorities if they had seen him, she
says.
González says he traveled by land through
Honduras and Guatemala with a teenage cousin. They took the bus and
also walked and hitch-hiked in some places.
Once
in Mexico, they got on the cargo train migrants call "The Beast."
Migrants get a risky, but free ride clinging to the outside of the
train. Violent gangs sometimes board the train to rape, rob and kill
migrants. Those without money to pay off the gangsters are thrown off,
sometimes to their deaths in deep ravines or sharp rocks.
González
says he never faced any gangs. Things seem to be going well for him and
his cousin for a while. They had been traveling for a few days on the
train and were excited at nearing the U.S.-Mexico border and crossing
into the land of their dreams.
But they
were also tired. They ate what they could, but were unable to sleep for
more than an hour at a time. They were hanging onto the grate above
the train car's couplers. "We used our own sweaters to tie ourselves to
the train so we wouldn't fall off," González says.
But
tragedy was just around the corner. Somehow, he doesn't know how, he
fell off the train while sleeping. He woke up bleeding profusely. "The
train had severed my right leg and part of my left heel," he says.
He
was eventually rescued by the Mexican Red Cross and taken to a hospital
where he recovered for a month. He stayed at a shelter for wounded
migrants for another two months. There he was fitted with a prosthesis
free of charge.
It's not difficult to
find stories of minors in Central America who have lost limbs, been
kidnapped or died while trying to travel through Mexico with the dream
of migrating to the United States.
Juan
Armando Enamorado, a 22-year-old who lives in the coastal town of Tela,
Honduras, says he almost lost his life at 17 when he jumped off the
train, fleeing from gangs.
"They got on
the train to steal money from people. When I heard they were coming, I
jumped off the train traveling at more than 30 mph," he says.
Enamorado says he was barely able to make it to the nearest town after walking for four days without food and very little water.
(CNN)
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