6 JULY 15, 2021 RIDGEWOOD TIMES WWW.QNS.COM
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��hen Elsy was growing
up penniless in Honduras,
she felt blessed
to live near a river due to her
home’s lack of running water
and plumbing. Yet, the rising
tides would often flood the
bamboo-and-brick structure
— eventually forcing her parents
to move further into the
nearby village, where Elsy
lived with her eight siblings.
Her father eventually
walked out on them when she
was six, and, in her words, “life
became even harder.”
“After sixth grade I stopped
attending school,” she said. “I
left school to help my mother
look after the younger children
while she went to work. As a
teenager I started to worry
about our situation and wonder
what would happen with
my life.”
Elsy’s life is captured in
detail in Sharon Hollins’
new book “Crossings: Untold
Stories of Undocumented
Migrants,” which spends
12 chapters recounting the
lives of a dozen immigrants
and their extraordinary
journies to America.
For Elsy, her family’s first
foray to the land of opportunity
came when she was
14, and her mother made the
treacherous trip to America,
believing it was the best way
to improve her childrens’ economic
prospects.
Without her mom to look
after her, Elsy eventually reconnected
with her estranged
father, and began living with
him, her stepmom, and her
three half-siblings in a different
area of Honduras.
The reunion wouldn’t last
long, however. Just before her
15th birthday, three gun-welding
men opened fire on the
family, killing her dad, and
shooting Elsy in the chest.
“The bullets started whizzing
past my head and going
through the wood of my dad’s
house behind me,” she said.
“I could hear dishes breaking
inside the house as bullets
sprayed the kitchen.”
“I was lucky,” she said. “The
bullet had gone in through my
back and out the other side.
You can still see the mark from
the bullet hole.”
Elsy eventually took up
with a boyfriend, who she left
after he “forced himself” upon
her. But, she later found out,
her life would changed forever.
“My world initially came
crashing down when I figured
out that I was pregnant,” she
said. “The pregnancy was from
the rape, and I had few options
and didn’t know what to do.”
Eventually, Elsy gave
birth to a baby girl named
Astrid. Her love for her newborn
was overwhelming, and
the thought of separating herself
from Astrid was devastating,
but Elsy knew that going
to the United States was her
best option to keep Astrid out
of extreme poverty that was
rampant in Honduras.
So Elsy found a female coyote
(the name for a person who
smuggles people illegally), who
took her by car to Guatemala,
and then Mexico, where she
waited on overcrowded dirty
floors for about a week, while
waiting for more potential border
crossers to join them.
Eventually, the group totaled
18 people, and they
boarded a bus for the next rung
of their journey.
“If you think that sounds
okay—it wasn’t,” Eksy recalls.
“The journey was excruciating.
Eighteen hours sitting on
the floor in a small space with
no stops to get out and go to the
bathroom,” she said.”
When their “suffocating”
journey finally took them to the
U.S.-Mexico border, the group
gathered secretly after dark in
a three-bedroom house, which
was usually filled with around
50 people.
“The coyotes drink and use
drugs,” Elsy said. “Sometimes
the men take some of the girls
from the groups and force the
girls to have sex with them.”
Avoiding that fate, Elsy patiently
waited until it was finally
their time to go, when she
received her instructions:
“We are going to drive you
for about an hour to a place
near the border,” a coyote told
her. “Once we get you to this
place, then this is what you are
going to do — get out and run!”
About 40 people braved
barbed-wire fencing for hours
by foot, before reaching awaiting
cars, and drove all the way
to Los Angeles.
“We had made it!” Elsy
said.
Her care-taking coyote
helped her pick out some new
clothes, before flying Elsy to
New York in April to be with
her mother. (Long before 9/11,
airport security wasn’t as
strict as it is today for domestic
flights).
She reconnected with her
mom, who had been working as
a nanny for a family in Brooklyn,
who drove Elsy’s mom to
pick her up at the airport.
“My mom came armed with
hugs, kisses and a nice sweater
for me.”
The next day, Elsy began
work helping the sister of her
mother’s employer, looking after
five kids. By 1997, Elsy had
managed to get a salary increase
to $420 a week, which she
sent home to her daughter and
other family members — except
for spending a small amount on
English classes, which helped
her become fluent.
When her employer moved
to a new state, Elsy began working
for a different family in East
Northport on Long Island.
“It so happened that they
had a friend called Willy who
had just been divorced. The
family was helping him by letting
him stay in their home,
and that is how I met my future
husband,” she said.
Willy and Elsy eventually
had two children, and they
were able to file the proper paperwork
to allow Astrid to join
them in America. When Willy
got a good job at a local business,
the family was able to buy
their own home in 2006. Astrid
would go up to join the Navy, before
heading off to college.
Now, the immigrant enjoys
her stable life in America, and
has expressed her eternal gratitude
to the country she worked
so hard to live in.
“I love this country and everything
it has given me,” Elsy
says. “I think for me, I achieved
the American dream.”
This story is part of a bi-weekly series containing edited
chapters of Sharon Hollins’ 2021 book “Crossings: Untold
Stories of Undocumented Migrants.” Each chapter of the
book tells a different story of an immigrants’ journey to the
United States.
/WWW.QNS.COM
