After a Treacherous Trip From Honduras, Aiming for an Education

Once they reached the middle of the river, the current was so strong and the water so deep that one of Mr. Mejia’s friends started drowning. Mr. Mejia tried pulling him up by his shirt, but to no avail. He also started drowning. “God, please,” he recalled thinking. “Please save me.” Suddenly, they reached a riffle and managed to cross to the other side.

The ordeal lasted minutes, Mr. Mejia said, but it felt like a lifetime.

They eventually approached Border Patrol agents, and Mr. Mejia was placed in a shelter run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement in Texas for about four months until he moved to New York to stay with his father and stepmother.

Before then, Mr. Mejia had almost no relationship with his father, who had left the family for the United States when Mr. Mejia was an infant and eventually settled in the Bronx. About seven years ago, Mr. Mejia’s father called him unexpectedly, and Mr. Mejia memorized the phone number. When he arrived in Mexico, he reached out to his father for help.

In the Bronx, Mr. Mejia, now 20, enrolled in high school and joined the school’s soccer team (he is a die-hard Real Madrid fan) in his junior year. While he was grateful to have left Honduras, which has one of the world’s highest murder rates and where more than half the population lives in poverty, according to the Central Intelligence Agency, the adjustment was challenging. His father went from being a stranger to his caregiver, and Mr. Mejia was homesick.

In the summer of 2016, he was so down that he considered returning to Honduras. Then he joined another soccer team, at a church in East Harlem, and started attending services there. It was a transformative experience, he said, and it gave him a sense of inner peace. The resentment he had felt toward his father for leaving him when he was a baby eased, and he began to appreciate how hard his father had worked to provide for his family.

Source: The New York Times

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Keywords:

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