I was born in December and my father died one month before. As I make known in the dates, I never had the opportunity to spend a moment with my father and he dreamed of having a girl. My mother didn't tell him that I would be a girl. She would tell him the same day he died. My mother was devastated by the death of my father and she could not have a stable relationship with anyone else, therefore I never had a father figure in my life. I was never able to come home and see my father waiting for me, hear his voice, hug him or tell him “I love you”, or hear him tell me “I love you” or that he was proud of me. But my mother kept going on with her life and was always with me.

When I was 3 years old, she started working full time and I almost never
saw her. She left the house at 6 in the morning and returned at 7 or 8 at
night. But when it was holiday season she didn't arrive until 12 or 1 in the
morning. So I have almost no memories with her and I don't blame her, she
works hard to stay “financially well.” She was almost never with me on my
birthday and it always bothered me. My mother always says, “God knows
why these things happened to us.”

It took 14 years for life to begin to be on our side. One day my mother received a call from a man who would become my stepfather. He was the son of my maternal grandmother’s best friend. That call was a few months after
my grandmother died in September 2017. My stepfather had been here for
about 25 years. And yes, he knew my mother but they had never started
a conversation. That call was one of the best experiences in my mother's
life since a few months later in 2018 my stepfather traveled to Honduras to
meet my mother and me. They had a stable relationship and decided to get married on the same day I turned 15 (a very special day for me) in 2019. Al-
most a year after getting married they wanted to be together and my mother decided to come to the United States illegally. Months after she arrived they
decided that I needed to be here with them too.

When I was only 17 years old, I took a trip to the USA. I went through many
things, for example I didn't eat anything, there were entire days where we
couldn't even go to the bathroom, and I also went through a kidnapping, the
worst of all. My experiences with 8 people, 6 men, me and another woman
were frightening. That was the most terrifying thing. I was kidnapped for
6 days, asking God to take us out of that place. But finally one Monday on
February 26, 2022 I was able to reunite with my mother and stepfather. I am
very happy to be with my family, I have what I always wanted, a very present
father, someone who likes to spend quality time with his family, someone
who tells me that he loves me, someone who says he is proud of me. God's
purposes are great and I feel that life is now on my side.

© Elizabeth . All rights reserved. If you are interested in quoting this story, contact the national team and we can put you in touch with the author’s teacher.