Jose 1:

Jose (#1, as anonymously each male will be called Jose and each female Maria) grew up in a small village of Intibuca called Pueblo Nuevo. He is a young, brown skinned man in his early twenties, voicing a shrill laughter of E's naughty jokes. He appears to have arrived to Virginia from the Garden of Eden, knowing nothing of sex or nudity and calling marriage 'accompaniment' or 'finding company'. I see his childhood in an isolated cerro, full of God's Word (Logos) dripping from his mother's lips from the time milk dripped into his lips from his mother's breasts.

"How do people get over here?" I asked.

"They take out loans from different people. People that have come to the US and have gone back to Intibuca with money will provide loans, but with interest."
"What if you come here and you can't find a job?"
"The interest adds up and you have to pay more. Sometimes the people that lend you money ask to hold a title to your land before they let you borrow from them. If you fail to pay the loan, they keep your land as a collateral."

"How much does it cost to come here?"
"It costs about $10,000, or 200,000 Lempiras. My family was able to borrow L. 60,000 from a gentleman, and L.50,000 from a lady that had worked here in the US and gone back."

The conversation went on to describe the sacrifice, the effort, the dangers of the road to the Dream. "It's gotten a lot harder to make the trip." he said, "Bandits in Mexico stop the buses and ask for credentials and will take out anyone who lacks credentials. It has made the trip more expensive..."

The young man talked openly, as if it had been a breeze. But before he told me the story, little did I know that he, like many others, had to grip onto his life with the fiercest claws of faith his soul could conjure.