#but as a run down in her 27 minutes when she was in limbo or dead or wahtever you want to call it

[lucarus]

                                                  𝟽:𝟸𝟿:𝟶𝟻 𝙿𝙼

When   you   open   your   eyes   you   wonder   if   you’re   going   to   go   blind.   There’s   a   light   that   shines   so   bright   it   hurts   to   pry   apart   your   eyelids.   It   takes   a   second   for   you   to   realize   that   there   is   no   light.   There’s   just   white.   A   white   as   pristine   as   freshly   fallen   snow,   the   type   of   white   you   picture   in   your   head   but   can   never   seem   to   create   with   your   two   hands.   A   white   that   seems   eternal,   like   it’ll   soak   up   anything   that   gets   too   close.   It’s   dangerous   to   feel   so   serene   in   a   place   that   feels   so   hungry   for   your   bones.   

You   don’t   realize   you’re   in   pain   until   you   try   to   stand   up   and   your   body   threatens   to   crumble   underneath   you.   It   feels   like   weights   are   tied   to   every   lower   joint   and   you’ve   never   felt   this   sort   of   ache   that   seeps   into   you.   You’re   fighting   against   quicksand   but   your   feet   are   planted   firm   on   the   ground   below   you.   In   the   battle   against   your   body,   you   find   yourself   wondering   if   death   was   supposed   to   feel   so   painful.   It   takes   you   months   to   remember   that   you   were   aware   of   your   lifelessness   in   that   moment.   A   fleeting   thought,   but   a   conscious   one.   The   dead   are   well   aware   of   when   they’ve   stopped   existing   on   the   plane   of   mortality.   

When   you   look   up,   there’s   nothing   above   you.   The   space   seems   to   blend   into   itself,   and   you   only   come   to   the   conclusion   that   you’re   in   a   hallway   when   your   arm   span   doesn’t   reach   its   full   potential.   Your   fingers   graze   against   the   sides   as   you   slowly   put   one   foot   in   front   of   the   other.   Your   vision   has   begun   to   adjust   so   you   can   make   out   the   slightest   shadow   that   carves   out   the   path   in   front   of   you.

You’re   in   a   maze,   and   it’s   a   daunting   realization.   Like   a   mouse   in   an   experiment,   you   instinctively   look   up   as   if   you’ll   find   your   captor   watching   down   on   you.   There’s   no   profound   disappointment   when   you   don’t.   In   fact,   there’s   a   sense   of   ease.   Like   you   belong   here.   Like   curling   up   in   the   corner   of   this   maze   will   lull   you   into   a   tranquility.   For   a   second,   you   even   humour   the   idea.   Your   knees   knock   against   each   other,   and   you   picture   your   body   sliding   down   the   wall   and   coming   to   a   still.   You’re   not   sure   what   part   of   your   brain   decides   otherwise,   but   you   don’t   give   in   to   the   hypnotizing   urge.   You   continue   forward.

The   first   dead   end.

You   hear   them   say   your   name.   With   the   right   curl   of   their   tongues,   you   hear   Luciana.   The   walls   speak   to   you   and   you   close   your   eyes   because   you   like   hearing   the   way   people   say   it.   Strangers,   people   that   don’t   really   know   you   but   convince   themselves   they   do.   There’s   not   many   of   them,   enough   for   you   to   discern   voices   from   one   another.   You   think   you’d   hold   each   individual   near   and   dear   to   your   heart.

There’s   a   smell   that   wafts   into   your   nose   and   it   makes   your   forehead   crease.   Something’s   burning   and   it   reminds   you   of   the   cheap   salami   you   had   to   live   off   of   during   your   student   years.   It   brings   back   memories   of   barely   making   ends   meet   and   you   wrap   your   arms   around   your   middle   in   discomfort.   A   life   you   had   tried   to   leave   behind   with   the   promise   of   fame   and   fortune   creeps   back   into   your   senses.   The   voices   come   and   go   like   waves   washing   up   on   a   shore.   They’re   loud   all   at   once,   they   applaud,   they   jeer   and   then   they   disappear   and   that   smell   comes   back.   

The   lump   in   the   back   of   your   throat   spills   down   your   cheeks   as   tears.   A   vicious   cycle   of   recognition   and   the   consequences   of   fifteen   minutes   of   fame   dawn   on   you.   You   stumble   backwards   as   the   voices   come   to   a   stop.   They   don’t   return   this   time,   and   that   feeling   of   sudden   fatigue   threatens   to   swallow   you   whole.   

The   second   dead   end.

This   time   there’s   more   of   them.   The   voices   are   so   loud   they   ring   in   your   ear   drums.   This   time   they   call   you   Lucy,   some   call   you   Lulu,   but   none   of   them   say   Luciana.   They   won’t   shut   up   and   you   try   to   place   your   hands   over   your   ears   but   it   only   makes   it   worse.   You   take   a   deep   breath   in,   the   way   you   do   before   stepping   out   of   a   car   and   onto   a   red   carpet.   You   brace   yourself.   You   put   on   a   smile   as   if   you’re   actually   addressing   a   crowd   you   can’t   see,   but   there’s   a   sinking   feeling   in   the   pit   of   your   stomach.   You   want   to   crawl   out   of   your   skin,   and   before   you   can   stop   yourself   you   feel   your   nails   clawing   at   your   own   arms.

What   scares   you   more   is   that   there’s   no   voice   in   the   back   of   your   head   telling   you   to   stop.   They   don’t   stop   crying   out   your   name   with   joy   and   enthusiasm,   and   you   can’t   stop   wanting   to   shed   the   face   you’re   wearing.   It’s   not   yours.   You   don’t   recognize   yourself   in   the   mirror.   And   you   won’t   recognize   yourself   in   your   own   casket.

So   you   run.

The   third   dead   end.

This   one’s   all   too   familiar.   Maybe   because   your   routine   is   always   the   same,   it’s   hard   to   pry   one   event   from   the   other   when   you   follow   the   same   steps.

You   hear   the   roll   of   tires   against   the   road   and   it’s   like   you   can   feel   the   silk      draped   across   your   skin.   You   hear   yourself   shuffle   to   find   the   compact   in   the   purse   you   brought   with   you   and   your   driver   asks   if   you’re   okay.   You   hear   his   voice,   gruff,   he   always   sounds   like   he   has   a   sore   throat.   You   offer   him   a   grin   that   he   catches   in   the   rearview   mirror   and   sends   you   one   back.   You   experience   the   bliss   of   not   having   a   care   in   the   world   as   you   fish   around   your   purse.   Chopin   plays   on   the   speakers,   and   you’re   mildly   embarrassed   that   it’s   the   only   thing   that   keeps   you   calm   before   a   big   party.   You’ve   never   understood   why,   the   piano   wasn’t   even   your   favourite   instrument.   You   much   prefer   a   violin.

Suddenly   your   head   feels   like   it’ll   burst.   Your   heart   is   racing   and   you   reach   up   into   hair   that   you   expect   to   come   out   bloodied   and   matted,   but   your   fingers   come   clean.   Your   hand   shakes   in   front   of   you,   and   you’re   not   sure   what   happened.

Somewhere   in   the   distance   you   hear   the   faint   sound   of   sirens   approaching.   The   world   is   still   spinning   and   you   have   to   keep   your   hand   against   the   wall   to   remind   yourself   that   you’re   still   here.   You   hear   the   static   of   a   police   radio   somewhere   near   your   left   ear.   You   can’t   hear   anything   out   of   your   right.   You   shudder   when   you   feel   a   finger   against   the   side   of   your   neck,   their   pulse   beats   against   your   skin.   Yours   isn’t   there.   The   police   report’s   a   car   crash,   and   you   think   you’ve   heard   enough.   So   you   continue   in   your   search   for   an   exit.

The   fourth   dead   end.

You   stop   and   stare   at   it   from   a   distance.   There’s   nothing   menacing   about   the   way   it   hangs.   

As   you   draw   closer,   you   think   you   can   hear   it   speaking   to   you.   Whispers   that   curve   around   the   shell   of   your   ear   as   your   arm   reaches   out   to   it.   Your   chest   heaves   as   your   heart   pounds,   and   fear   seems   to   take   control.   Your   thoughts   don’t   run   in   a   straight   line   and   you   feel   like   the   only   way   to   stop   the   world   from   spinning   around   you   is   grab   onto   the   rope.   For   stability.   For   closure.   Tied   tight,   you   clutch   onto   its   circular   form   and   you   find   everything   coming   to   a   still   again.   

You   wonder   if   your   head   will   fit.

                                                 𝟽:𝟻𝟼:𝟸𝟹 𝙿𝙼

You   wake   up.

[purplesurveys]

801

1. Candyland: What is your favorite type of candy? Gummies. I’m not really into chocolate or caramel candies. 2. Chutes & Ladders: Do you have a fear of going up on ladders? Does your house have a laundry chute somewhere? I’ve never had to climb up a ladder but I do think I could just as well have a fear of it since as a kindergartener I was always afraid of going up the jungle gyms. I don’t know what a laundry chute is. 3. Operation: How many surgeries have you had in your lifetime? Zero, thank goodness. The idea of having to be put under and then being sliced open makes me feel faint lmao. 4. Sorry!: Do you sometimes apologize, even when it’s not your fault? Yes, abusive people can make you pick it up as a habit. 5. Game of Life: What is your greatest accomplishment thus far? What do you hope to do with the rest of your life? I count getting into my university as my biggest accomplishment so far, but I know I can still do so much more. I don’t really have a specific career goal, but I do want to ultimately be the best at whatever job I end up in and to be the happy with whoever I end up becoming.

6. Cootie: Did you really used to think that boys/girls had cooties? No...I never heard of those until I was ten watching American cartoons. 7. Trouble: What is something big that you got into a lot of trouble for? My algebra grades in high school. I almost flunked freshman algeb and nearly had to go to summer school. Math was never my strong suit in those days, heh. 8. Puzzles: When was the last time you felt puzzled/confused? How often do you feel like you don’t fit in? The other day while making Gab’s surprise birthday video. I had never made a video before, so the program itself was very foreign to me and at first I doubted I could ever come up with anything. Luckily my sister, who is in film school, was such a big help in helping me get acquainted with the different features and buttons haha. As for feeling like I don’t fit in, I haven’t really felt that a lot in the last couple of years. Other than my experience with AIESEC, I’ve been a lot better in dealing with different groups of people and adjusting to their interests and personalities.  9. Hungry Hungry Hippos: What’s your favorite meal to eat? A nice juicy burger usually works for me. 10. Uno: Can you count to ten in another language? If so, which language? Filipino, Spanish, and Korean. 11. Go Fish!: Have you ever been fishing before? No. I've always lived in the city so I’ve never been exposed to fishing. It’s very common for those living in the province, though. 12. Old Maid: Did you ever have a maid in your house, growing up? We had house help for a short time when we first moved into our house. But because my mom is super organized and very particular about it, we went through like 15 house help in total before she realized she’d rather do everything herself. There were three who stayed longer than a few months because my mom found them very good, but they all wanted to go back to the province eventually so we had to give them up. Most stayed for like a day or two, a week at most. 13. Simon Says: Did you always do everything you were told as a child? I think so, yeah. 14. Red Light, Green Light: When you approach a yellow light, are you more likely to slow down or speed up? Depends if I’m in a hurry or not. 15. Are you any good at jump rope, hopscotch, or hula hooping? Have you ever used a pogo stick before? I can do the first three. I’ve never used a pogo stick and have only seen it in cartoons. Looks fun but I also know I’d break my bones using them lol. 16. Do you prefer chalk or bubbles? Two very different things, but I remember loving bubbles as a kid. My only encounter with chalk was when we’d draw a hopscotch court on the ground, so yeah not a lot of interaction with it. 17. Did you used to go on a lot of bike rides as a child? Not really. My lola always told us we couldn’t go too far away from home, so I followed her. 18. Capture the Flag: What is your country’s flag? What about your state’s flag, if you have one? The Philippine flag has a white triangle at the left side with three stars symbolizing our three main islands, and a sun with its eight rays symbolizing the eight provinces that had big contributions in the 1896 revolution against Spain. On the right, the flag is divided into blue on top symbolizing peace, and red symbolizing patriotism. The two colors can be switched depending if the country’s at war. 19. Tic Tac Toe: When you played, were you the “hugs” or the “kisses”? I dunno, I picked whatever symbol I felt like picking if someone would ask me to play. 20. Have you ever won a game of Marco Polo in the pool without cheating? I’ve never played Marco Polo because I don’t know how the game works. Not very common here. 21. Scrabble: Are you any good at spelling? Yes. I was That student who aced all the spelling quizzes in English class lol. 22. While playing rock, paper, scissors, which do you usually throw down first? I always mix it up. 23. Were you always stuck being the pickle in the middle? I don’t know what this means. 24. Limbo: How low can you go? We never really played this. 25. When playing, did you usually pick “Truth” or “Dare”? Truth, because I have no problem telling it and people usually pick pretty shitty dares for you to do. 26. Have you been involved in any innocent games of Spin the Bottle or 7 Minutes in Heaven? No. Not common games here. I didn’t even know about 7 Minutes in Heaven until I watched 13 Going on 30 when I was like, 14 lolol. 27. Twister: Are you a flexible person (figuratively or literally)? I’m not very physically flexible. I can adjust for a lot of situations, though. 28. Did you used to pretend that the floor was lava? Kinda? In my old school there was a line pattern on the school grounds, and when I would walk I’d try not to hit any of the lines. 29. Guess Who: Are you any good at guessing games? Sure. 30. Clue: Do you think that you would be able to successfully solve a murder case? No, I don’t really like brainteasers like those. 31. Mouse Trap: Have you ever felt trapped before, in some way? Of course, in various ways. I’ve felt trapped at home, in my course, in my own head, etc. 32. Labyrinth: Have you ever gotten lost in a maze? No, that sounds terrifying and just reminds me of The Shining, eugh. 33. Jenga: Are you careful about what choices you make in life? I try to not be reckless, at least. 34. Bop it or Skip-it? Neither. 35. Tag: Are you in shape? Do you enjoy running? I wouldn’t say I am, but my body is also not in an unhealthy shape. I hate running. 36. Kickball: Did you kick the ball over the fence a lot as a kid? No. Houses here don’t really have fences. 37. Are you any good at mini-golf? No, never played. 38. Telephone: What do you do with a rumor once it’s been told to you? I didn’t really get a lot of rumors about me. The one time I did, it was so stupid I told our head teacher about it to put it to rest immediately. 39. Hide and Seek: Have you ever hid so well that it felt like it took somebody forever to find you? What was your best hiding spot? No. I don’t like making people nervous for too long. I didn’t have a hiding spot. 40. What Time Is It, Mr. Fox?: When were you old enough to tell time on an analog clock as opposed to a digital one? Hahahaha I don’t actually remember. I wanna say 8 years old? 41. Mother May I: Did you always ask your parents for permission? Yes. Always better for them to know what I’m up to than sneaking out and being caught. 42. Follow the Leader: Can you be bossy at times? I can be bossy all the time. 43. Monopoly: Are you good with your money/finances? If I absolutely have to save, like if Christmas is coming up, I’ll surprise myself at how good I can be. Most of the time though I like treating myself :/ Lmao. 44. Chess: Have you ever wanted to be king/queen? Only when I was younger. I’d wear a blanket around and pretend it was a cape. 45. Play-doh or Slime? Ooh that’s a toughie, those are my favorite kinds of toys. I did grow up with Play-Doh though and even had a Play-Doh Factory, so I’d go with that. [a-zebra-is-a-striped-horse] 

[cordlock7-blog]

WWE’s Roman Reigns Announces Cancer In Remission, Returns To Ring

By Chuck Carroll

(CBS NY/CBS Local) — When Roman Reigns stepped through the curtain Monday night, he was met by an unfamiliar sound. It was heartfelt applause stemming from a place far deeper than just a desire to cheer for one of the good guys on TV. Absent was the chorus of boos to drown out cheers from his allegiance of fans.

On this night, not a single detractor could be heard among the thousands of members of the WWE Universe who had gathered in Atlanta. On this night, the Big Dog was universally beloved.

Thunderous chants of “welcome back” reigned down from every corner of the arena. The prolonged cheers delayed his first live remarks since the fateful night last October, when he announced that he was relinquishing the Universal Title and walking away from the ring to battle leukemia for the second time in his life. Reigns hadn’t said a word on WWE TV in more than four months, so what was another few minutes?

Roman Reigns (Photo Credit: Emma McIntyre/Getty Images)

Finally, 10 minutes into the live broadcast of Monday Night RAW, he could speak.

“I’m probably going to say this a lot, but I’m going to start out by saying ‘thank you,’” Reigns began.

Fittingly, some in the crowd began chanting “you are welcome.”

The WWE Superstar who has clawed his way to the top of the sports entertainment world and built a reputation as a fearless competitor then made an uncharacteristic confession. Thinking back to last fall, the powerful Samoan confessed to being terrified and insecure prior to revealing to the world his cancer had returned after being in remission for 11 years.

>>MORE: Roman Reigns, Breaking Character, Reveals He Has Leukemia

“So many people prayed for me that God’s voicemail was full,” he said. “That is how strong it was to be surrounded by y’all’s love and grace… I can do anything with that type of strength and love.”

His words, coupled with the writing on the black tank top that adorned his still muscular body, hinted at what was to follow: We Fight. We Overcome. We Believe.

Roman Reigns (Photo Credit: Ron ElkmanSports Imagery/Getty Images)

“When I made my announcement, I said I was going to swing for the fences. We did better than that,” Reigns continued. “We didn’t just swing for the fences, we hit a home run. I’m so grateful, so humbled, and so honored to announce this. The good news is I’m in remission. So with that being said, the Big Dog is back.”

The crowd erupted, giving the once controversial former champion another undivided standing ovation, as deafening chants of “welcome back” again echoed throughout the arena.

His response was equally heartfelt.

“Thank you so much. I love y’all,” he replied.

Even before Reigns was able to deliver the uplifting update, some in the audience were calling for him to declare an opponent at WrestleMania. Without missing a beat, he paused and smiled, then said that he first had to crawl before he could walk and then walk before he could run. Of course that will do little to quiet the speculation that his Mania future will soon become clear.

There doesn’t appear to be a path for him to challenge for the Universal Title that he was forced to give up due to the cancer diagnosis, as Royal Rumble winner, Seth Rollins, is set to challenge current champion, Brock Lesnar. However, as of now, Daniel Bryan’s dance card and a shot at the WWE Championship seem wide open. In recent weeks, there had been speculation that Bryan would be facing an unnamed returning Superstar. Many assumed that the mystery man would be revealed as John Cena, Bray Wyatt or Kevin Owens. But with Monday’s announcement, the door is open for Reigns to lay the smackdown on the devilish vegan and make the jump to Tuesday nights. Looking ahead, his presence on SmackDown can only help shore up slumping ratings and bolster viewership, as the show prepares to move to a new network in the fall.

>>MORE: From the world of Pro Wrestling

Dean Ambrose and Roman Reigns (L-R) (Photo Credit: JP Yim/Getty Images)

In the more immediate future, the door has been left open for a potential reunion of The Shield, the faction that launched Reigns’ career in WWE and cemented his status as one of the promotion’s top stars. The returning champion and Rollins ran to the ring to save an outnumbered Dean Ambrose from a three-on-one beatdown at the hands of Bobby Lashley, Baron Corbin and Drew McIntyre. As storylines go, there will need to be some fence-mending before that can happen after WWE controversially decided to have Ambrose turn on Rollins on the same night Reigns announced the reemergence of his cancer. As of now, none of the men have a match scheduled at the upcoming Fastlane pay-per-view on March 10.

But as Reigns said, that is to be determined down the line. For now, we celebrate more than the return of a wrestler. We celebrate a father who has devoted countless hours to improving the lives of thousands of others battling life-threatening illness and has himself beaten leukemia back into remission.

Welcome back, Roman. You were missed.

News & Notes

The other big news coming out of Monday’s show was the return of Dave Bautista. The Guardians of the Galaxy star brutally beat down Ric Flair, spoiling The Nature Boy’s 70th birthday celebration and appearing to set the wheels in motion for a showdown with Triple H at WrestleMania.

The triple threat match between Ronda Rousey, Charlotte Flair, and Becky Lynch for the RAW Women’s Championship at WrestleMania also took a step forward Monday. As part of the storyline, Lynch was arrested for defying orders and showing up to attack Rousey despite her ongoing suspension. Rousey then left the title in limbo by seemingly relinquishing it after Stephanie McMahon declined to sign off on the match.

>>MORE: Is Ronda Rousey Leaving WWE?

WWE Hall of Famer Tammy “Sunny” Sytch has run afoul of the law yet again. The 46-year-old is now facing charges of driving while intoxicated after being arrested in Seaside Heights, New Jersey Saturday evening. Authorities are also levying charges of driving on a suspended license, failing to stop at a stop sign, having an open container of alcohol in the car, reckless driving, driving the wrong way on a one-way street, and careless driving, according to multiple reports. Police say Sytch also had outstanding traffic warrants in Holmdel, NJ, which is less than an hour away. PWInsider’s Mike Johnson is reporting that officials in Pennsylvania filed to revoke her parole prior to the most recent arrest. She spent much of 2018 incarcerated in the state following multiple arrests for DWI.

WWE Hall of Famer Arn Anderson has been fired from his backstage role as a producer for the company. Anderson had been butting heads with Vince McMahon, which led to his ouster according to Dave Meltzer of The Wrestling Observer. An original member of The Four Horsemen, Anderson was not present for Ric Flair’s 70th birthday celebration on RAW.

Tye Dillinger and Hideo Itami have both requested and been granted their releases from WWE. There is some speculation that the former will eventually join AEW.

Former WWE Cruiserweight Champion TJP has also been let go by the company for disciplinary reasons, according to Meltzer.

Tickets to Ring of Honor’s debut in the Pacific Northwest will go on sale for Honor Club members on February 27 and to the general public on March 1. ROH will run in Kent, Washington on June 1 and Portland, Oregon on June 2.

ROH Women of Honor Champion, Mayu Iwatani, will defend her title against Kelly Klein at the ROH 17th Anniversary pay-per-view on March 15.

The Young Bucks vs. Lucha Bros is now official for AEW Double of Nothing on May 25.

Chuck Carroll is former pro wrestling announcer and referee turned sports media personality. He once appeared on Monday Night RAW when he presented Robert Griffin III with a WWE title belt in the Redskins locker room.

Follow him on Twitter @ChuckCarrollWLC.

Source: https://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2019/02/26/roman-reigns-wwe-cancer-leukemia-remission-ring-return-wrestlemania/

[lodelss]

Alice Driver | Longreads | June 2019 | 21 minutes (4,024 words)

DISPONIBLE EN ESPAÑOL

“I will go with a map,” decided 16-year-old Milexi. Her love of maps, she said, was part of what gave her the confidence to migrate roughly 1,460 miles from El Portillo, Honduras, to McAllen, Texas, alone. When I interviewed her in August 2018, she sat, her body tense, her gaze direct, on the sunlit patio of the Border Youth Care Center (CAMEF El Centro de Atención a Menores Fronterizos) in Reynosa, Mexico. Milexi’s hair was parted down the middle, and it shined in the sun as she said, “My dream was always to travel on the Beast,” as the train that runs from one end of Mexico to the other is known; migrants hop on and off it as they work their way through the country, sometimes losing a limb or two if they miscalculate the jump onto or off of the train. Milexi dressed as a man and made it as far as Reynosa before being caught and turned over to the Center, where she had then spent 57 days and made the request to receive asylum in Mexico.

Milexi left Honduras because her stepfather beat her mom and one of her brothers. She said that he beat her mother for years, that he fractured her 11-year-old brother’s knee. She said that she started cutting herself at age 7, but was also proud of herself because, for the past year, despite feeling anxious, she had not cut herself once.

Then she added a detail: One night her stepfather beat her mother. She waited until he was asleep then got a knife from the kitchen and stabbed him. “I had bad luck and the knife struck in the wrong place,” she explained without blinking. Her stepfather survived and after that, she decided to leave Honduras.

Milexi hoped to request asylum in the United States on the grounds of domestic violence, perhaps unaware that U.S. policies related to domestic violence had changed. In June 2018, then Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in a decision titled Matter of A-B- vacated an immigration court decision to grant asylum to a woman fleeing domestic violence. A federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s policy ending asylum for those fleeing domestic violence, but the situation for migrants who request asylum based on domestic violence claims remains in limbo and is still open for interpretation. Orange County–based immigration lawyer Ashkan Yekrangi said that Session’s actions have created a gray area in which judges are unsure of how to treat asylum cases based on domestic violence claims. For now, according to Yekrangi, “The majority of cases are still being denied because judges and the Department of Homeland Security are relying on the Matter of A-B-.”

A room for migrant girls at the Home for Children in Reynosa.

Milexi knew none of that. I hovered, indecisive about whether to try to explain what was going on in the U.S., worried that the weight of such knowledge would throw her into despair. Mexican photographer Jacky Muniello and I had decided that we wanted to work on a project with migrant girls, because we felt like their stories were often untold or that their voices were included only in certain stereotypical contexts like discussions of prostitution or human trafficking. We were aware that it would be difficult — potentially impossible — to navigate not only Mexican bureaucracy and getting the permissions necessary to interview and photograph minors, but ethically complicated as well. I let Milexi speak, interrupting her as little as possible, worried that the slightest misstep on my part would break her sense of trust in me. Her first reflections about the journey were filled with wonder — the freedom of traveling on her own, of living free of violence — but the weight of unsaid trauma hung in the air.

Four months after leaving Honduras, Milexi arrived in Reynosa. It was June and temperatures hovered near 100 degrees. She walked into a city with in which journalists were afraid to report the truth, a city where photojournalists had long faced the choice of either dying for their vocation, fleeing the city, or becoming wedding photographers. Citizens who wanted to find the latest news relied on a Facebook page called Code Red Reynosa (Código Rojo Reynosa) where anonymous sources posted information about events, mostly violence, in real time. On walls around the city, devotees of Holy Death had spray-painted her likeness, a skeleton in hooded robes carrying a scythe, sometimes accompanied by the words No me chingues (“Don’t fuck with me”). Although Milexi didn’t know it when she arrived, she was as likely to wake up to the sound of a shootout between various cartels, including splinter groups of the notorious Gulf Cartel and the Zetas, along with the Army, which occupies the city, as anything else. As she discovered, soldiers dressed in camo and bulletproof vests patrolled the city in armored SUVs with mounted gun turrets.

Tomás, a resident of Reynosa, paid a local artist to create a mural honoring Holy Death, a popular saint in the area. The words written next to Holy Death’s mouth read, No me chingues (“Don’t fuck with me”).

Milexi was apprehended while trying to cross the border to McAllen, Texas. She still had the round, full face of a child — it had not yet gotten lean like her body  — and she wore no makeup. She was one of 37 migrant children at the Center in Reynosa that August whose ages ranged from 12 to18. The kids at the shelter wandered around in laceless shoes — even the metal grommets had been removed — a precaution the center took with minors to prevent self-harm. The shelter held a maximum of 120 kids, explained José Guadalupe Villegas García, the coordinator at the Center, before he pointed out, “There are no mirrors, because they can hurt themselves.” The Center was surrounded by a white fence and manned by a security guard. Until the situation of each minor was legally defined, they could not leave.

Migrants, even when they are children, are often demonized in the media, both in Mexico and the U.S. “I honestly expected to find myself working with very bad or aggressive guys. That is the stereotype of Central American migrants,” explained Víctor Tolentino Reyes, 29, an artist from Reynosa who works with children at the Border Youth Care Center on art projects. Of the migrants he had worked with, he said, “You run into children who are searching for a better future; or you run into children who are on their way to meet their parents for the first time, parents who left them when they were newborns; or boys who are fleeing for their lives and are going through a difficult stage for any human, which is adolescence or puberty. And here they face all types of situations, because it is complex to face that you are locked up.” Of the roughly dozen children I interviewed, most mentioned the difficulty of living at the Center and the fact that at some point, after enough time, it did feel like a prison.

sis, 27, from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, tries to console her daughter Linda, four, who is sad because she can’t leave the enclosed space of the Home for Children.

In 2018, more than 30,000 children from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador were temporarily held in Mexican detention centers like the Border Youth Care Center. During a roughly two-week period in January 2019, some 3,000 children crossed from Tecún Umán, Guatemala, into Tapachula, Mexico. Minors are held for their own safety at such centers, given the risk that they could be kidnapped by gangs and that deportation for a child who has experienced physical or sexual violence or been threatened by a gang, could result in death. Some of the minors are apprehended in Mexico while others cross into the U.S., are caught by border patrol, and deported. According to the Pew Research Center, U.S. apprehensions of unaccompanied children rose substantially between June 2017 and June 2018. Migrants like Milexi, if left on their own in Reynosa, for example, are likely to experience violence at the hands of gangs or to be kidnapped and sold into prostitution. The Center tries to identify parents or relatives in order to release minors to family; once that occurs, the minors are then transported to their home country (if the minor, though, is a native of Mexico, the child can remain in the Center until they reach 18 years of age and can legally make decisions for themselves). This means that some children spend months or years at the Center.

The Border Youth Care Center where Milexi was held is one of several in Mexico run by the National System for Integral Family Development (DIF), which among other programs, provides safe housing to undocumented minors who have been apprehended by Mexican authorities or deported by U.S. authorities back to Mexico. According to the Migration Policy Institute, an estimated 25,000 children were repatriated in 2015, and through 2018, Customs and Border Protection reported that some 50,000 minors were apprehended at the border between ports of entry.

Jacky and I received permission to visit the Border Youth Care Center in Reynosa and the Home for Children (Casa Hogar del Niño), a shelter for children under 18 and their mothers or female relatives. The only condition for our access was that we would only use first names and we would not photograph the faces of children without the written permission of their mothers or relatives, in the case that they were accompanied. I had previously been denied access to the Border Youth Care Center in Nuevo Laredo in June 2018, and the director of that center stated that he couldn’t risk bad press during an election season, which ended the following month. The directors of both centers in Reynosa discussed being afraid, in general, that journalists would be critical of the conditions there, and while they conceded to only a brief interview, they gave us access to interview migrant children for roughly an hour a day over a period of a week.

* * *

At the Home for Children, I interviewed two 8-year-old girls, my first experience with such young subjects. Karen sat with her body erect as she told me that she didn’t feel scared traveling through Central America. Her tiny ears were pierced with gold studs, and she squatted next to a tree on the playground of the Home for Children surrounded by a low wall decorated with the handprints of migrant children. She was from Tepec, Guatemala, and her parents lived in the U.S. She said she had traveled with her 7-year-old cousin to Reynosa, Mexico. She did not provide details. When I asked her how long she traveled, she responded, “Day and night.” I wondered how fully she grasped the details of her journey, if she had been able to process all the changes in her life since leaving Guatemala.

Karen crouched next to Katerin, also 8, who had traveled to the U.S. with her mother in order to be reunited with her father. Katerin explained that she and her father lived in Florida for a few months before they were both caught and deported. Her father was being held in a separate facility in Reynosa. When I asked her if she wanted to request asylum in the U.S. she responded, “I don’t know.” Then she explained, in the meandering way of a child still making sense of her surroundings: “We are going back to our home because my grandma was with my grandpa and two of my uncles and an uncle who has a store. And my mom was sad because her cousin died. We didn’t know, but a girl talked about her cousin to his mom and told her that he had died. I want to talk to my grandma, but I don’t know if they are going to allow me a phone call to talk to her.” Karen and Katerin sat close to each other silently, their bodies relaxed, their friendship budding. Then they stood up and followed a group of kids over to the fence, grabbing the top rail with their plump fingers, gazing out beyond the fence at a wall. Before leaving the shelter, I had Karen’s mother and also Katerin sign an interview and photo permission form. Neither of them had a coherent story, but they had shared with me what they could. Karen wrote out her name, face full of concentration, in square letters constructed deliberately, in the hand of someone who has recently learned to write. I had permission from the Home for Children to interview Karen, and I had whatever concept of consent an 8-year-old can grant.

At the Home for Children, I also met Erika Izabel from Trujillo, Honduras, who sat beside her daughters Erika, 10; Ashley, 7; and Tifany, 4, near the playground. She said left “more than anything, because of domestic violence.” According to a 2015 United Nations report, domestic violence was the leading crime reported in Honduras, but few abusers are convicted in court. Erika’s brother gave her $500 to help pay for bus fare and food so that she would not have to risk her children’s lives. Her husband gave her some money too, and he told her, “Follow your path, nobody is going to stop you.” Her oldest daughter, tall and like a string bean, looked out into the playground yard, lost in thought. Ashley, whose hair was in a French braid, hovered next to her mom. She said that she was not afraid of the journey to Mexico and explained “because I didn’t want to be there,” referring to Honduras. Tifany, ran up to her mother and began to hiccup as her eyes overflowed with tears. She started to sob silently, her curls trembling, then whispered in gulping breaths, “I miss school.” Her mother, unable to bear the sadness, looked up at the sky.

Tifany, 4, migrated with her mother Erika Izabel and her two sisters from Trujillo, Honduras to Reynosa, Mexico. She and her mother and sisters stayed at the Home for Children while requesting asylum in Mexico.

Erika also worried about the girls missing school. “They are very intelligent. They get good grades. It is the only thing that worries them — missing school. But then when I have thought, maybe in moments of despair, to pray for deportation, they tell me at that moment that they do not want to go back to the house.” Her oldest daughter, her namesake, began to cry. As she wiped tears from her face, she said that her father was violent to her mother: “He hit her a lot. He told her he wanted to kill her.” Erika, her mother, mentioned that the girls remembered everything, that the littlest one still said, “My dad is bad.”

Liliana, 19, from La Unión, El Salvador, told me that she had lived at the Home for Children since she was 17 when she arrived with her son Josef, who was a few months old at the time. The pair had spent almost two years at the shelter due to the fact that her first asylum request in Mexico was rejected, and the Home for Children, fearing she would be murdered if deported, provided her support to appeal the ruling. Josef had played on the swing set in the heat of the afternoon, and he was asleep in Liliana’s arms. Liliana piled her golden-brown hair on top of her head, but curls escaped at the nape of her neck. She wore a multicolored halter top, and she sat at a table in a hallway that connected to the playground on one end and the dormitories on the other. She talked about meeting the father of her child, a 35-year-old member of the MS-13 gang, when she was 15. “He was always violent,” she said, talking with downcast eyes about how he beat her when she was pregnant. Her mother had migrated to the U.S. when she was young, leaving her with a brother. “There was nobody to help me,” she explained, rocking Josef in her arms. She talked about how common it was for older men to date minors in El Salvador, said that you could file a complaint about it, but because it was so common, everyone, even the police, saw those relationships as normal.

“The whole time that I was with the father of my child, he did not let me communicate with my mom. I did not have a phone. I did not have internet. I did not have anything,” said Liliana. She lived with her boyfriend, his brother — also a gang member — and the brother’s wife. Liliana remembered the brother choking his partner with an electric cord and leaving her unconscious. Liliana had requested asylum in Mexico but due to a lack of documentation of the domestic violence she discussed, her request had been denied. The shelter continued to care for her and Josef during the process of appealing the ruling, fully aware that without their support she would be on the streets of Reynosa with a young child and unable to work due to her legal status.

A migrant minor who traveled unaccompanied through Central America sits on a bunkbed frame at the Border Youth Care Center in Reynosa.

* * *

Like Milexi, Erika and her daughters and Liliana and her son had initially hoped to request asylum based on domestic violence claims. When I interviewed Milexi in August, it marked the three-month anniversary of her arrival in Reynosa, and she was still waiting to receive asylum in Mexico. She didn’t know how long it would take. She said that initially she did not think the trip on the Beast would be either too easy or too difficult. Then she listed what she saw along the way: a girl raped, a boy killed, and two gang members pushed off the train and ground to pieces by its wheels. She described, “I even had to see the rape of a young girl. She was raped there, they did … oh, poor thing! In front of everyone, in front of all the men. Obviously, I did not want to see it, because how ugly! On the train, they did it! How horrible! There were so many of them, eight who did it. There was so much blood that the whole cabin was full of blood and even the handrails where you get off the train were covered in blood.” She talked about the rape, her face flat. The last she saw, the girl was weak and nobody wanted to help her.

In the railway car that she rode in, Milexi said the rape victim was the only other girl. The girl was traveling with a boy, Milexi explained, but then added, “But there are rules.” Before hopping on the train, Milexi said a group of 12 boys gave all the migrants a talk, listing the rules of the Beast:

No couples traveling together in the same railway car

No cuddling or kissing

No insults

No stealing

Milexi said that everyone had to respect the rules, then added, “That girl failed. I doubt she was saved.” She said that the girl was kissing her boyfriend and that she wore “flashy clothes.” In contrast, Milexi dressed as a man. “I think that they didn’t even recognize me as a woman,” she said.

Then calmly, without changing her tone of voice or taking a breath, Milexi described the assault. A gang member demanded that a migrant hand over all his belongings and money, to which the migrant responded, “Why do I have to give you my things if I am suffering? Why do I have to give them to you?” The gang member then called him a “fucking fag,” took out a knife, and cut him open. Milexi said that the blood made a sound, something like psst psst. She sat, frozen, sure that she would be the next victim, until the guys she was traveling with said, “What are you doing? You’re insane. Something is going to happened to you if you don’t stop watching that.” Milexi said, “I couldn’t speak. My throat felt swollen. I couldn’t speak given what had just happened. I stayed there. I was in shock.”

At another point, she said that gang members started chasing her and her friends down the train. They shouted, “Stop, you motherfuckers!” Milexi and the boys she traveled with ran from railway car to railway car. A migrant boy in front of her turned around and told her to go ahead. When two gang members caught up to the migrant, he hit one, who then fell down the stairs and was pulled into the wheels of the train. The migrant then pushed the other gang member off the train. Milexi remembered shouting, “Oh, no, he is going to fall!” She described the train eating him up, starting with his feet, as the rest of his body trembled.

Milexi talked about running out of money when she arrived in Monterrey on the Beast. The first person she saw there was a young woman who was sweeping. She approached her and said, “Hey, boss, can I help you sweep? Can I help you clean?” In return for her help, Milexi asked the woman for a bus ticket to the city center. The woman responded, “Oh, yes, my daughter,” and then Milexi started to mop and wash clothes. Later, upon arriving in the heart of the city, Milexi saw a butcher cutting up chickens. She offered to skin the chickens, and in return he gave her 50 pesos (about $2.50) and a free phone call. She called one of her neighbors in Honduras, who before going to look for her mother, who she hoped to talk to, said, “Oh, girl! Where you have made it, many men have failed.”

She decided to stay in Monterrey and try to earn some money to afford a bus ticket for the rest of the way to the border. She got a job as a chili seller at the local market and woke up at 3 a.m. every day. “My family was very proud of me, and my plans were to bring my mom and my little brother here,” she explained, adding “so they can get away from my stepfather. He is like a super spy and he doesn’t leave them alone.” After several months in Monterrey, she saved up some money and made her way to Reynosa, hoping to cross into the U.S. She admitted that she was worried about the border, about avoiding gangs, about finding places to sleep, about being caught by La Migra. Beyond those fears, she dreamed of getting a university degree and talked about her love of computer science and her interest in joining the armed forces.

Sitting on the patio of the Center, dappled in sunlight, she turned the tender flesh of her wrist toward me, displaying hundreds of faintly overlapping lines — scars of her own making. Then she pointed to her thigh. She wanted to show me the history of her pain, and so she wrapped a towel around her waist and pulled down the left leg of her jeans to reveal several dark gashes covered by a delicate crosshatch of scars. She began cutting her flesh after her stepfather started raping her. She eventually told her mother about the abuse. “She slapped me and told me I was a whore and that I had offered myself up,” explained Milexi, looking straight ahead.

Milexi stands in a dorm room at the Border Youth Care Center, showing the scars she made when she started cutting herself at age seven.

Fleeing her home was also her first time traveling outside of Honduras, and she was enchanted by the landscapes of Guatemala and Mexico. Milexi said: “It was very beautiful to travel on the Beast. I loved it, if it weren’t for so many crimes and assaults and all that. If I was deported to Honduras and if they asked, ‘Do you want to go back [on the Beast]?’ I would be delighted just because of what I got to see. There is so much violence in Honduras that I was already used to that in my house.” As Milexi signed the interview consent form, she spelled out her name, drawing tiny circles over each dotted “i,” then she signed her name in cursive with a controlled flourish.

Milexi, like Lilian and her son and Erika and her daughters, had survived more violence at home than most of us could imagine. They all had hoped to request asylum in the U.S. based on domestic violence claims, but even if they got the chance, it remains unclear whether the U.S. asylum system would listen to their stories. Milexi ran her fingers tenderly over her wrist, touching the scars that she made to survive. And then she looked me in the eyes and said, “I have faith that I will get ahead. This is just momentary.”

* * *

More from this series: Father of Migrants The Mutilated and Disappeared The Road to Asylum

* * *

Alice Driver is a freelance journalist and translator based in Mexico City. She is the author of More or Less Dead, and a 2017 Foreign Policy Interrupted Fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Outside Magazine, The Atlantic, Oxford American, Lenny Letter, The Guardian, and Pacific Standard.

Editor: Mike Dang Photographer: Jacky Muniello Fact-checker: Matt Giles Copy editor: Jacob Gross Translation: María Ítaka

[thechasefiles]

The Chase Files Daily Newscap 8/31/2019

Good Morning #realdreamchasers. Here is your daily news cap for Saturday, August 31st, 2019. There is a lot to read and digest so take your time. Remember you can read full articles via Barbados Today (BT), or by purchasing a Saturday Sun Nation Newspaper (SS).

WAY FORWARD – A major step has been taken towards having a medical marijuana industry in Barbados with the piloting of the Medicinal Cannabis Industry Bill 2019 in the House of Assembly yesterday. Minister of Agriculture Indar Weir piloted the much-touted legislation in a comprehensive presentation during the opening session of the House.Up front he dismissed fears surrounding the legalising of marijuana by explaining the Bill was not intended to decriminalise cannabis that is used for recreational purposes, but to make way for Barbados to secure a stake in the global medicinal cannabis business that is projected to reach US$100 billion in trade in six years.The minister said the move to develop a medical marijuana industry represented a paradigm change in the process of wealth accumulation by Barbadians, since the industry provided for nationals to have a major stake in the business.(SS)

PARTY RAPS GOVERNMENT FOR HANDLING OF TOURISM AFFAIRS –The People’s Party for Democracy and Development (PdP) has given the Barbados Labour Party a failing grade with respect to matters on tourism. The verdict was handed down by the party’s spokesperson on tourism and regional and international transport, Scott Weatherhead on Thursday in the Leader of the Opposition’s office in Parliament.“We believe the Government is doing a really poor job of managing the tourism sector given the restructuring of the various tourism entities of Government-owned and managed state owned enterprises now together, along with some of the other projects legislated to come online, many of which have been stalled. “Some have been badly handled, particularly the Hyatt project and the acquisition of lands. You don’t go about a project like that where Government goes and acquires private lands ostensively and then leases those lands for another private hotel,” he charged. (SS)

DEXTER JAMES & QEH PART WAYS - Dr Dexter James is no longer at the helm of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH). In a media release tonight, the Board of the QEH said the two parties “have mutually agreed to part ways”with effect from today. James was appointed Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the hospital In October 2009 and was tasked with leading the transformation of the 600-bed tertiary care teaching institution. He has been on sick leave since February 27, 2019.

STILL NO WHERE TO GO – Germaine Felix is caught in limbo with the Welfare Department, the National Housing Corporation (NHC) and a landlord who wants her out of her house now. She claims that this morning when she went to the Welfare Department to ask for assistance to acquire food and school supplies for her children, she was told that her plight could not be heard until September 23. Her initial appointment for August 26 was cancelled due to the passage of Tropical Storm Dorian. “I even fill out a paper to get uniform for them this morning. But because the lady tell me I got to come back, them can’t go to school when school open because I don’t have nothing for them. “If I got to wait until the 23rd school wouldn’t be opened already? I supposed to get a food voucher but I got to wait all until the 23rd and I ain’t got nothing home for them to eat,” she said.  In addition to not having food in her house, the utilities have been turned off because Felix has been unable to pay her bills. Then, earlier this month, Felix received yet another notice from her landlord giving her and the children 14 days to get out the house. But, the St Lucia-born who contended she has nowhere to go with her children who were born in Barbados said that while she was sent to the NHC to fill out an application form weeks ago, she was told that no housing was available. She said officials at the Welfare Department told her to find a house and they would make the effort to assist her in paying the rent. However, according to Felix, she was not finding any potential landlord who was willing to enter an agreement with the Welfare Department. “It is hard for me to get a house. I went to a gentleman and he said welfare does take too long with the rent money and he don’t want to wait. But I still looking around. I just need a house to get out of here. I ain’t got no water, I ain’t got no light. “I got to be going at people and asking them for water. The truth is I don’t want help all the time, it is until I get back on my feet. As long as I get through, I will give somebody else that really need help. I just need the help,” she said. It was in July when Barbadians became familiar with Felix’s urgent appeal for assistance after she declared that the owners of the King Street, City house had given her an eviction notice because she owes thousands of dollars in rent. At that time, the cleaner said she was struggling to feed and clothe her three children, aged 17, nine, and eight, because her just over BDS$100 per week wage was barely helping her to make ends meet. The mother had admitted that she had been unable to pay her $800 monthly rent and other bills since the father of her two younger children, who signed the contract to rent the house, left days after they moved in on March 1, and had not been giving her any money to assist with running the household. “I just want to get out of here. You can’t wash no dishes, you can’t bathe, you can’t use the bathroom, the light turn off this morning. If I could have done better I wouldn’t be in this position. NHC saying they don’t have any house but people still going and getting help. I stressed and the children taking on the stress too,” Felix said. “Every minute them asking me ‘you get somewhere mummy? If you don’t get somewhere we will be on the road’. Every minute them peeping to see if the landlord coming to put us out. That ain’t good for these children. That could mash up them heart,” she added. When contacted this evening, an official who is familiar with Felix’s case said that her claims, as it relates to the Welfare Department, would be investigated as soon as possible. (BT)

BODY IDENTIFIED AS RAHIM WARD – A mother’s worst fear was realised today. Barbara Dorant-Layne broke down after identifying the body taken from a shallow grave at Walkers, St Andrew, this afternoon as that of her son Rahim Ward. The 22-year-old of Cottage Grove, St George, had been missing for a week, and police and Barbados Defence Force soldiers did the third search for him this morning in the rugged terrain near the St Andrew Parish Church. The body was discovered around 6 a.m. in a disturbed area, and just before 4 p.m., Dorant-Layne and other members of the family were allowed to view it. She was heard saying: “them killed my son; them killed Rahim”. His grandmother Virgene Ward, one of the last people to see him alive, and other family members, were also at the scene.(SS)  

HOT HEAD IN TROUBLE OVER MESSAGE – On Thursday, Jason Renaldo Ashton declared his head was hot and that was why he told a man “what I had to tell him”. Yesterday, he railed at the “unfairness” meted out to him and declared: “I feel I gine kill myself.”Ashton was back in the District “A” Magistrates’ Court yesterday, after he appeared initially on Thursday.The 31-year-old, of Brittons Hill, St Michael, admitted he used a computer to send the electronic comment: “I want you to stop messaging my phone, you f****** idiot or let me come and pelt some bullets through your house,” on July 31, and he intended to cause or was reckless as to whether he caused annoyance, inconvenience and distress.(SS)

ST. JAMES MAN CHARGED WITH DRUG TRAFFICKING – Police executed a search warrant at the home of a St James man and discovered almost 250 cannabis plants growing. Members of the Drug Squad of the Royal Barbados Police Force arrested and charged Jerry Nathaniel Haynes, 47, of Halls Village No. 1 on Wednesday for possession of cannabis, possession with intent to supply, trafficking and cultivation.They seized 243 plants ranging in height from one foot to six feet and loose quantities of cannabis were also dfound.The 32.9 kilogrammes of cannabis has an estimated street value of $131 600. (SS)

LEVI BACK ON TRACK – Levi Cadogan is aiming to make a stunning return to track and field after a two-year ban for doping. The Bajan Olympic sprinter resumed training on Wednesday after he was cleared earlier this year following a two-year ban.In 2017, the former Carifta Games silver medallist, who made his Olympic debut in Rio 2016, tested positive for the banned diuretic and masking pill furosemide.The National Anti-Doping Commission (NADC) initially ruled for Cadogan to be sidelined for 24 months but he appealed to the court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) and his drug sanction was reduced to 20 as a first-time offender. (SS)

HOLDER STALLS INDIA – India captain Virat Kohli and opener Mayank Agarwal stroked half-centuries but West Indies skipper Jason Holder responded with a terrific display of pace bowling, as the home side shared honours on the opening day of the decisive second Test yesterday. Sent in at Sabina Park in excellent conditions, India reached the close on 264 for five, with Kohli top-scoring with 76 and Agarwal getting 55.Well placed on 157 for three at tea, India lost both Ajinkya Rahane (24) and Kohli inside the first hour following the resumption, but Hanuma Vihari carved out an unbeaten 42 and wicketkeeper Rishabh Pant, an unbeaten 27,  to deny West Indies any further success in the session in a crucial 62-run, unbroken sixth-wicket partnership.Low-keyed in the Antigua opening Test which West Indies lost by 318 runs inside four days last week, seamer Holder sprang to life in the humidity of the country’s capital with a haul of three for 39, including the prized wicket of Kohli. (SS)

That’s all for today folks there are 122 days left in the year Shalom!  Follow us on Twitter, Facebook & Instagram for your daily news. #thechasefiles #dailynewscaps #bajannewscaps #newsinanutshell

[gyrlversion]

Inside Hulls most rundown street

It is a street which has been left to wrack and ruin with families waking up every morning to a scene of misery and desolation.

Over the years, the number of houses in Pretoria Street, west Hull, has dwindled and declined to the point where a solitary and lonely row of eight houses now look out over what has become barren wasteland.

Just a few years ago the cul-de-sac was bustling with homes on either side of the road but now just a handful of residents remain on the street, which is effectively in a state of limbo.

Leon Armstrong, pictured, his partner Kimberley Brown and their three children have lived in one of the few terraced houses left in Pretoria Street for the past four years. They are looking to escape the area

The homes around Pretoria Street in Hull are earmarked for demolition, but the work cannot start until all homes are empty 

However, the decline in the area has prompted people to start dumping illegally in green areas near the abandoned houses

Understandably, many feel like they’ve been left behind, and they’ve had to watch in despair as thousands of new homes get built just five minutes down the road at the Amy Johnson development off Hawthorn Avenue.

‘We’ve been left behind’

Leon Armstrong, his partner Kimberley Brown and their three children have lived in one of the few terraced houses left in Pretoria Street for the past four years.

They have seen homes around them get torn down and they thought they too would be moved out of their family home and placed elsewhere as part of the huge regeneration.

However, the family are still waiting for that to happen and Miss Brown admitted she is desperate to move for the sake of her children. 

‘I hate it,’ the 25-year-old said. ‘But I can’t afford to move out.

‘It’s not nice for the kids to see police and the fire brigade down here because kids are setting things on fire. Last summer we had druggies down here who caused a few problems and you daren’t leave your front door unlocked.

‘We feel like we’ve been left behind and we don’t feel safe here.’ 

The local council had initially secured funding for redevelopment under a regeneration programme although the plans had to be halted when the 2010 coalition government halted the scheme

In 2012 Hull City Council managed to secure £8m funding under a Regional Growth Fund from housing minister Grant Shapps

Pretoria Street is the most deserted street in Hull by percentage, according to the latest figures on the City Council website

An area of unkempt grassland right in front of the deserted street has become a zone for fly-tipping. There is a scorched circle where bonfires have clearly been lit and a pile of black bin bags next to an array of peculiar items.

From cots to sofas, scooters to children’s toys, there is a mix of abandoned rubbish but the biggest concern is the empty houses left to gather dust.

Although most have been boarded up, some have had their windows smashed in, nearly all of them have been daubed in graffiti, one has clearly been set on fire and for Miss Brown the whole look makes for a ‘depressing’ view.

‘It’s horrible to look out of the window and see that,’ she said. ‘We thought they were going to build a park on there but that never happened.

‘We’ve had drug dealers next door to us in the past and they came with a gun and that didn’t help me considering I’m quite an anxious person anyway.

‘We want to move but just can’t afford it so we’ve got to make do with what we’ve got.’

Mr Armstrong, who is 27, said the clutch of neighbours in Pretoria Street rarely speak to one another and he admits there is no sense of community.

‘That grassland used to be full of houses and it’s sad how they’ve just left it like that. It’s a quiet street and people don’t really come out.’

‘This is my family home’

However, not everyone loathes living in Hull’s most deserted street.

Tina Scholey, 47, is one of Pretoria Street’s longest residing residents having moved in 18 years ago, and although she admits the street has become an eyesore, home is ultimately where the heart is

Tina Scholey, 47, is one of Pretoria Street’s longest residing residents having moved in 18 years ago, and although she admits the street has become an eyesore, home is ultimately where the heart is.

‘I like living down here,’ the mum-of-three said. ‘I’ve never really wanted to move because it is my family home.

‘It’s all my kids have ever known and all the memories we’ve had over the years have been at this property.’

Miss Scholey agrees it needs ‘whipping into shape’ and she recalls there were plans to tear down the whole of Pretoria Street in a huge regeneration project.

She thinks it is ‘crazy’ for just eight houses to be left and says sometimes people get confused and think Pretoria Street has been abandoned.

‘It does look bad and sometimes I’ve had booked taxis come and then drive off because they think it is a hoax call,’ Miss Scholey said.

‘It was full of terraced housing on both sides and I think the way they are doing it is crazy. Why would you leave eight houses up?

‘When they were pulling down the houses they gave us new windows and doors to be in keeping with the new properties that would be built around us but why build around old houses?

‘By the time they get round to building them these new doors and windows and not going to be new anymore.’

Miss Scholey also admits it is sad to see that a green field outside their homes has become a ‘dumping ground’ for fly-tippers, with residents concerned about the waste.

‘People class it as wasteland over there,’ she said. ‘People bring their horses on it and it is just a mess. People have bonfires on it and it is just a dumping ground.

‘Kids go on it and inside the houses and you don’t know what they get up to in there. They are an eyesore and there is a concern about food waste because we don’t want vermin coming into our homes.’

‘We feel forgotten about’

Thomas Dumughn, 24, who has lived in Pretoria Street with his partner, Ellie Caulfield, 23, for just over a year is due to move next month.

He says living in such an isolated street presents as both ‘a blessing and a curse’ but his partner admits for the past year she has felt ‘forgotten about’.

Mr Dumughn said: ‘It’s silent, quiet and there’s no one about which is good but it’s a depressing place to be. I grew up in Swanland and Brough and this just isn’t a good place to be.

‘Rubbish is a problem down here and you do get fly-tippers too. It’s not nice to see and because of the rubbish you do see rats running around in the field.

‘That is why we are moving and we’re going up to Greenwood Avenue.’

Miss Caulfield added: ‘I suffer from mental health problems and moving here has been depressing. Our house is full of damp but the neighbours are lovely – it’s just the area.

‘It’s deserted and we feel ignored. They could make this into a really lovely area but we just feel forgotten about.’ 

Unsurprisingly, Pretoria Street is the most deserted street in Hull by percentage, according to the latest figures on the Hull City Council website.

If you take out the big streets in Hull, such as nearby Anlaby Road, Holderness Road and Hessle Road, Pretoria Street has the fourth highest number of empty properties with 11 standing dormant in the cul-de-sac.

The plan for the Hawthorn Avenue area was to knock down all the houses and rebuild them as part of the Gateway regeneration scheme.

However, it has not been that straightforward, with the scheme abruptly halted following the creation of a new coalition government in 2010.

Two years later, an agreement was reached between Hull City Council and the office of then Housing Minister Grant Shapps over the release of £8m from the Regional Growth Fund. This cash released further council money and also ensured private developer Keepmoat could invest in the area.

The go-ahead was then given to allow long-standing plans for the demolition of 224 privately-owned homes dating back to the First World War and to be replaced with new housing. Overall, it would result in 1,475 new and refurbished homes with £135m of investment.

But there was frustration for residents living in White and Pretoria streets, who were told their homes would not be demolished and they would only receive frontage improvements. Effectively, they would be living on a building site.

Hull City Council has said it was not possible to demolish all of the properties in Pretoria Street due to the cul-de-sac’s layout.

The authority is waiting to purchase four empty properties at the end of the street and should it be successful, the council will then look to demolish the remaining houses ‘as soon as practicable’.

A spokeswoman for Hull City Council said: ‘After the Government removed Housing Market Renewal Funding in 2010 the council successfully bid for Regional Growth Funding to carry out a facelift improvement programme to 137 properties in the Newington area, including those fronting Pretoria Street.

‘The remaining properties in the area are part of the demolition and new build proposals which includes 17 and 19 Pretoria Street and the properties to the rear, all of which are currently empty.

‘Residents living in properties proposed for demolition were relocated as part of the council’s voluntary acquisition programme with the last remaining resident moving in March 2016.

‘The remaining empty properties at the end of the street are part of a Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) by the council to acquire the last four remaining property interests.

‘Due to the layout of the streets it was not possible to demolish all of the remaining empty properties until these remaining interests were acquired.

‘The CPO hearing took place on Tuesday, March 26, 2019, and we are now awaiting the outcome. Should the Order be upheld, the council will seek to demolish the remaining properties as soon as practicable.

‘The land already has planning permission in place for the development of 241 two and three bedroom homes. These will be developed by the council’s procured development partner for the area, Keepmoat Homes, with properties for sale and affordable rent.

‘Plans for the redevelopment can be found through the planning portal on the council’s website.

‘The council’s dedicated Renewals Team continues to manage the area through this period and if there any specific issues relating to the condition of properties or the land assembled for development, then they should contact the council.’

Anyone with concerns about fly-tipping should report them to Hull City Council by calling 01482 300 300.

The post Inside Hulls most rundown street appeared first on Gyrlversion.

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[lotsofdogs]

PBF Baby #2: Pregnancy Weeks 37-38

Hi friends!! I’ve received more than a few comments on the blog and messages on Instagram letting me know a handful of you are officially on “baby watch” along with me and my family right now. I SO appreciate you following our journey so closely and will absolutely keep you all in the loop when things get rolling. (I’m assuming I’ll post some kind of an update via Instagram Stories first just because that’s easiest.)

I’m 39 weeks pregnant right now and already passed the point where I went into labor with Chase which means I’ve reached a point I never actually got to in my first pregnancy… The waiting game! I fully anticipated reaching my due date with Chase and never really played the “any day now” game but I definitely feel like we’re entering that territory right now and it’s really exciting.

Now that I’m 39 weeks, I wanted to share a recap of the last two weeks of pregnancy with you guys which you will find below!

Here are my past updates from this pregnancy if you’re just catching up:

A Miracle On The Way

The First and Second Trimester (So Far)

PBF Baby #2: Pregnancy Weeks 20-23

PBF Baby #2: Pregnancy Weeks 24-27

PBF Baby #2: Pregnancy Weeks 28-31

PBF Baby #2: Pregnancy Weeks 32-34

PBF Baby #2: Pregnancy Weeks 35-36

What I’m Going To Pack In My Hospital Bag

You may also check out all of my weekly pregnancy updates from my first pregnancy on the Pregnancy page of this blog.

And now for my most recent updates…

Baby Updates

37 Weeks

38 Weeks

At 38 weeks, baby is the size of a winter melon! He or she is roughly 19.6 inches long and weighs approximately 6.8 pounds.

Weight Gained

My weight has been all over the place during these final weeks of pregnancy.

I gained a decent amount of weight in the first and second trimesters (above average) and then I’m not sure what happened, but my weight began to stagnate and then fluctuate and decrease by a few pounds. I initially blamed nausea that surfaced again with a bang almost daily several weeks ago and a dwindling appetite around dinner time but in the same breath I feel like I’m eating a lot and snacking constantly throughout the day.

I’m still within the recommended weight gain for pregnancy but went from a 30-pound gain to a 26-ish pound gain (again this is still fluctuating) which concerned me a bit.

Couple some weight loss with my belly suddenly measuring several weeks behind and that was the recipe for some anxiety over the past two weeks. During my 37-week appointment I was up 27 pounds (down a pound from the previous week) and at 38 weeks, I was down another pound. My doctor wasn’t concerned about my weight loss (apparently this is actually quite common at the end of pregnancy) but recommended an ultrasound at my 38-week appointment to check on our baby’s size when my belly measured 35 weeks since I’ve been measuring ahead almost my entire pregnancy.

You may read more about some of the stress surrounding the ultrasound in my Instagram post, but I was so grateful to learn that our baby is looking wonderful and measuring in the 60th percentile. (At my appointment the sonographer estimated our baby to weigh about 7 pounds 2 ounces!) Apparently our little one is getting everything it needs and growing just fine which was the biggest relief. I know Chase was a little baby but since we attributed his size to previous placental issues I do not have in this pregnancy, I couldn’t help but feel worried about our little one.

Workouts

Workouts are all over the place right now and pretty slow-paced. I’m working out 3-ish days a week and doing some modified boot camp workouts or strength training in our garage or at the gym. I also try to get out for a 2-3 mile walk with Sadie when I don’t get a formal workout in which makes me feel more energetic. My workout motivation is rather low lately but I always feel 10 times better from a physical standpoint when I move my body a bit during the day.

Symptoms

The biggest new-to-me change that happened during the 37th week of my pregnancy is that I began experiencing semi-frequent Braxton Hicks contractions. They never feel painful but they are uncomfortable, especially when they happen in the middle of the night. My whole stomach will feel hard as a rock for just under a minute and then go back to normal. There’s no pattern or predictability associated with the contractions but they’re happening randomly on a daily basis right now.

(Ryan hasn’t cut his hair since we found out we were expecting and is growing it out until our baby arrives! Check out those waaaves!) 

I also noticed myself feeling more and more exhausted by the end of the day and that seemed to culminate around week 37. (Last week, during my 38th week, I thankfully got a random burst of energy!) During week 37, however, there was something about the arrival of 4 p.m. that made me want curl up in a ball and sleep for the rest of the day. That wasn’t possible with Chase in the mix and I think the exhaustion I’ve felt during this pregnancy can be largely attributed to running after a toddler all day long. There’s not a ton of sitting and relaxing when Chase is up and about, that’s for sure! (This is also one of the main things that intimidates me about newborn life this time around!)

As I mentioned above, a switch seemed to flip last week and I honestly felt better during week 38th than I’ve felt in months. I’m not sure what was going on, but I felt more energetic and my body felt more comfortable – less aches and pains – than it has in a long time. Some people said this could mean the baby is dropping and while I feel like this may slowly be happening, I don’t feel like labor is right around the corner just yet. Still, an unexpected burst of energy was a very welcomed treat, especially since I felt quite uncomfortable and rather cranky just one week earlier.

Food Aversions

Similar to the past two weeks, I don’t have any strong aversions but my appetite definitely decreases throughout the day. I often feel like I eat a decent amount before 11 a.m. and then have to stick with smaller snacks the rest of the day or I’ll feel overly stuffed. It’s almost like my food is sitting high up in my ribs if I overeat at the end of the day, so mini meals and snacks are key for me right now as the days go on.

I had a few days where I found myself snacking on crackers or a couple of pieces of bread before bed because my stomach felt like it needed something but absolutely nothing else appealed to me.

Food Cravings

Carbs, carbs and more carbs. I’m snacking on cereal, slices of bread and crackers like it’s my job right now. Oatmeal is my favorite breakfast and I’m eating a big bowl of it almost daily. I am also still on the fruit obsession train and eating my bodyweight in watermelon, grapes and berries. And then there’s always chocolate and ice cream which I find myself craving on a daily basis.

Sleep

I am still waking up constantly in the night to go to the bathroom (we’re talking five times which isn’t so fun) and struggled with a night or two of restlessness where I woke up in the middle of the night and tossed and turned for a couple of hours. At 38 weeks, I had a few more solid nights of sleep (maybe this is why I felt more energetic!?) which was so, so nice and definitely not the norm around here.

Any Baby/Pregnancy Related Purchases?

I started to organize my hospital bag and we brought a lot of stuff down from our attic that we used and loved when Chase was a baby.

This made me realize we don’t have a ton of newborn size clothes for either a boy or a girl. (Chase lived in a diaper for much of the summer since I basically hibernated at home with him for a while and it was SO hot outside that summer – record temps in Charlotte!) I ended up ordering a couple newborn-size baby clothes so our baby won’t be naked since I have a feeling I’ll be out and about with this little one a lot earlier than I was with Chase since I’ll have a toddler to entertain as well.

I also have two pairs of comfy nursing-friendly pajamas packed and ended up ordering the long sleeve + pants version of the short sleeve + shorts version of my previous favorite super-soft pajamas.

Belly Button In or Out?

My belly button is definitely out right now but not overly noticeable through clothing.

Feeling…

On a walk with Ryan and Sadie over the weekend, I told Ryan I’m feeling like my life is majorly in limbo right now. There’s so much up in the air which is just crazy! When will our baby arrive? What will labor be like this time? Will we have a boy or a girl? How will Chase adjust to being a big brother? What will blogging look like with two kids in the mix? How will our family dynamic shift? So many unanswered questions but this limbo time also feels really exciting!

I’m also feeling this odd sense of anticipation and a huge understanding of how completely my life is about to change in a very permanent way. I am on the cusp of meeting a little person who is going to completely capture my heart all over again and know that the feelings of love, devotion, protection and vulnerability I already feel will only grow by the day.

During my first pregnancy, I remember feeling so much love for Chase and excitement for the future but there’s something about this pregnancy that feels different. In a way, I spent a lot of my first pregnancy in disbelief (that’s probably the wrong word — but it was almost like an out of body experience at times if that makes any sense at all) and I spent a lot of time wondering what it would be like to have a child and be a mother.

This time around, I know what it’s like to have a child and be a mother and something about this understanding has made me feel more emotional, more in awe of the miracle inside of my belly and more overwhelmingly ready to have another baby. I feel like I have a very real understanding of how the intense love I’m already feeling is about grow and blow me away all over again when I physically hold my baby and watch his or her personality grow and develop.

I feel all the more grateful and very aware that there’s a very real baby in my belly… my son or daughter. Knowing that this little one is going to rock my whole world in the best way and make my heart double in size is simply awesome.  And knowing that I don’t know much about this baby at all right know — both his or her personality traits, physical characteristics, etc. — is also really cool. I can’t wait to learn about our baby and get to know every part of him or her. Any day now!!!

[Read More ...] https://www.pbfingers.com/pbf-baby-pregnancy-weeks-37-38/

[mysweethorde]

Arthur, the hound who stole our hearts and our shoes

So it's been a week since we said goodbye to Arthur and I feel like I should say something . . . but what?  My heart is still so heavy.  I still wake up in the night and worry about stepping on him because he always pulled his bed right over next to my side of the bed.  He would do that and then spend several minutes squishing it up so that it was just right.  It was unbelievably cute how much effort he put into it.  

And I still swear I hear him when I'm prepping food in the kitchen.  He had a sixth sense for food being prepared or consumed.  He would hear the crinkle of a bag, the creak of the pantry door, or the unscrewing of a jar of peanut butter and he would come running from wherever he was.  Frequently he was on his bed underneath our bed so it was very audible all over the house because our bed is only 12" off the floor and he was a leggy hound doing a mighty amount limbo-ing to extricate himself.  I miss the sound of it immensely.  

I miss the way he would be so excited to see us that his tail would wag so hard it would hit his face and startle him.  I desperately miss his houndy bay.  It was like nothing else and it holds a special place in my heart because he kept it hidden for so long (probably until he was comfortable and truly happy with us several months after his adoption).  And I really loved how his jowls sometimes got caught in his teeth; it was adorable and ridiculous.  I should also mention that he was a CHAMPION sitter.  Our trainer in basic obedience warned us that some hounds never learn to sit, but then he went and proved her wrong by beating every other dog in class during musical mats (the sitting competition game). 

And GOD I miss those magnificent velvet ears of his.  They were soft like rose petals and they smelled like him in the best possible way.  And I would be remiss if I didn't mention his eyes.  That's what struck most people about him.  He might go a long time between baths, but all I had to say to the groomer when I called was "Arthur with the eyes" and she would remember him in an instant.  She loved his eyes.  We all did.  They were so soulful and they made him a top-notch beggar.  It was really hard to deny him anything.  He also had not one, but TWO Great Red Spots, which (as I've said before) made him twice as awesome as Jupiter.  

We did have to be careful about leaving anything out on the counter.  We learned the hard way that anything remotely edible would get eaten if we left the room for too long.  He ate a whole pound of raw tofu once.  On another occasion, he ate a pound and a half of defrosting pizza dough.  He also ate through a bottle to get to the [flavored] pain pills inside (prescribed for his brother Titus).  And most recently he ate a hole in a pair of my pants to get to a tiny dog treat I'd left inside.  On every occasion, I either called the emergency vet or took him to our own vet and on every occasion he was virtually unfazed.  He was simply amazing.

And I know I'm partial, but I'm pretty sure that he was just the sweetest and most gentle dog ever (unless he was taking treats because then you might lose a finger).  He didn't ask for much.  He did love riding in my truck, of course.  He also got very excited about walkies, but he was fine just to lounge around, too.  One of my favorite things ever was just to curl up on the couch with him.  He liked hugs, though you'd have to watch out because he would sneak in an ear lick if you weren't careful.  We'd often say he had a real "in-your-face caninity."

He was also a great collector, mostly of shoes.  As soon as Keith left for work in the morning, Arthur would go pick out one of Keith's shoes by the door and take it to one of his beds.  He had a lot of beds, so when we were missing shoes or clothes or slippers, we'd have to go look in all of his many beds (located under our bed, under the desk, under the stairs, and occasionally on top of the guest bed or day bed).  I couldn't find my favorite Dolly Parton concert T for so long that I wrote it off as permanently missing.  Then I found it tucked under the flap of one of his beds (seriously wedged down into the crevice).  It was black and completely covered in white and copper.  Bless his houndy little heart.

He didn't trust easily.  Most visitors might only catch a glimpse of him as he howled while backing away from them up the stairs.  He would retreat underneath our bed.  Or into the bathroom or a closet if there were thunderstorms or fireworks or other scary loud things.  Having the love and trust of such a shy dog was a great honor.  I really hope he knew how treasured he was.  Looking back through these 27 pages of Arthur posts (and those are just the ones I bothered to tag!) has made me laugh and cry and miss him even more.  But mostly it has made me really really glad to have had him in my life.

[lodelss]

Oh, Girl!

Alice Driver | Longreads | June 2019 | 21 minutes (4,024 words)

DISPONIBLE EN ESPAÑOL

“I will go with a map,” decided 16-year-old Milexi. Her love of maps, she said, was part of what gave her the confidence to migrate roughly 1,460 miles from El Portillo, Honduras, to McAllen, Texas, alone. When I interviewed her in August 2018, she sat, her body tense, her gaze direct, on the sunlit patio of the Border Youth Care Center (CAMEF El Centro de Atención a Menores Fronterizos) in Reynosa, Mexico. Milexi’s hair was parted down the middle, and it shined in the sun as she said, “My dream was always to travel on the Beast,” as the train that runs from one end of Mexico to the other is known; migrants hop on and off it as they work their way through the country, sometimes losing a limb or two if they miscalculate the jump onto or off of the train. Milexi dressed as a man and made it as far as Reynosa before being caught and turned over to the Center, where she had then spent 57 days and made the request to receive asylum in Mexico.

Milexi left Honduras because her stepfather beat her mom and one of her brothers. She said that he beat her mother for years, that he fractured her 11-year-old brother’s knee. She said that she started cutting herself at age 7, but was also proud of herself because, for the past year, despite feeling anxious, she had not cut herself once.

Then she added a detail: One night her stepfather beat her mother. She waited until he was asleep then got a knife from the kitchen and stabbed him. “I had bad luck and the knife struck in the wrong place,” she explained without blinking. Her stepfather survived and after that, she decided to leave Honduras.

Milexi hoped to request asylum in the United States on the grounds of domestic violence, perhaps unaware that U.S. policies related to domestic violence had changed. In June 2018, then Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in a decision titled Matter of A-B- vacated an immigration court decision to grant asylum to a woman fleeing domestic violence. A federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s policy ending asylum for those fleeing domestic violence, but the situation for migrants who request asylum based on domestic violence claims remains in limbo and is still open for interpretation. Orange County–based immigration lawyer Ashkan Yekrangi said that Session’s actions have created a gray area in which judges are unsure of how to treat asylum cases based on domestic violence claims. For now, according to Yekrangi, “The majority of cases are still being denied because judges and the Department of Homeland Security are relying on the Matter of A-B-.”

A room for migrant girls at the Home for Children in Reynosa.

Milexi knew none of that. I hovered, indecisive about whether to try to explain what was going on in the U.S., worried that the weight of such knowledge would throw her into despair. Mexican photographer Jacky Muniello and I had decided that we wanted to work on a project with migrant girls, because we felt like their stories were often untold or that their voices were included only in certain stereotypical contexts like discussions of prostitution or human trafficking. We were aware that it would be difficult — potentially impossible — to navigate not only Mexican bureaucracy and getting the permissions necessary to interview and photograph minors, but ethically complicated as well. I let Milexi speak, interrupting her as little as possible, worried that the slightest misstep on my part would break her sense of trust in me. Her first reflections about the journey were filled with wonder — the freedom of traveling on her own, of living free of violence — but the weight of unsaid trauma hung in the air.

Four months after leaving Honduras, Milexi arrived in Reynosa. It was June and temperatures hovered near 100 degrees. She walked into a city with in which journalists were afraid to report the truth, a city where photojournalists had long faced the choice of either dying for their vocation, fleeing the city, or becoming wedding photographers. Citizens who wanted to find the latest news relied on a Facebook page called Code Red Reynosa (Código Rojo Reynosa) where anonymous sources posted information about events, mostly violence, in real time. On walls around the city, devotees of Holy Death had spray-painted her likeness, a skeleton in hooded robes carrying a scythe, sometimes accompanied by the words No me chingues (“Don’t fuck with me”). Although Milexi didn’t know it when she arrived, she was as likely to wake up to the sound of a shootout between various cartels, including splinter groups of the notorious Gulf Cartel and the Zetas, along with the Army, which occupies the city, as anything else. As she discovered, soldiers dressed in camo and bulletproof vests patrolled the city in armored SUVs with mounted gun turrets.

Tomás, a resident of Reynosa, paid a local artist to create a mural honoring Holy Death, a popular saint in the area. The words written next to Holy Death’s mouth read, No me chingues (“Don’t fuck with me”).

Milexi was apprehended while trying to cross the border to McAllen, Texas. She still had the round, full face of a child — it had not yet gotten lean like her body  — and she wore no makeup. She was one of 37 migrant children at the Center in Reynosa that August whose ages ranged from 12 to18. The kids at the shelter wandered around in laceless shoes — even the metal grommets had been removed — a precaution the center took with minors to prevent self-harm. The shelter held a maximum of 120 kids, explained José Guadalupe Villegas García, the coordinator at the Center, before he pointed out, “There are no mirrors, because they can hurt themselves.” The Center was surrounded by a white fence and manned by a security guard. Until the situation of each minor was legally defined, they could not leave.

Migrants, even when they are children, are often demonized in the media, both in Mexico and the U.S. “I honestly expected to find myself working with very bad or aggressive guys. That is the stereotype of Central American migrants,” explained Víctor Tolentino Reyes, 29, an artist from Reynosa who works with children at the Border Youth Care Center on art projects. Of the migrants he had worked with, he said, “You run into children who are searching for a better future; or you run into children who are on their way to meet their parents for the first time, parents who left them when they were newborns; or boys who are fleeing for their lives and are going through a difficult stage for any human, which is adolescence or puberty. And here they face all types of situations, because it is complex to face that you are locked up.” Of the roughly dozen children I interviewed, most mentioned the difficulty of living at the Center and the fact that at some point, after enough time, it did feel like a prison.

sis, 27, from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, tries to console her daughter Linda, four, who is sad because she can’t leave the enclosed space of the Home for Children.

In 2018, more than 30,000 children from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador were temporarily held in Mexican detention centers like the Border Youth Care Center. During a roughly two-week period in January 2019, some 3,000 children crossed from Tecún Umán, Guatemala, into Tapachula, Mexico. Minors are held for their own safety at such centers, given the risk that they could be kidnapped by gangs and that deportation for a child who has experienced physical or sexual violence or been threatened by a gang, could result in death. Some of the minors are apprehended in Mexico while others cross into the U.S., are caught by border patrol, and deported. According to the Pew Research Center, U.S. apprehensions of unaccompanied children rose substantially between June 2017 and June 2018. Migrants like Milexi, if left on their own in Reynosa, for example, are likely to experience violence at the hands of gangs or to be kidnapped and sold into prostitution. The Center tries to identify parents or relatives in order to release minors to family; once that occurs, the minors are then transported to their home country (if the minor, though, is a native of Mexico, the child can remain in the Center until they reach 18 years of age and can legally make decisions for themselves). This means that some children spend months or years at the Center.

The Border Youth Care Center where Milexi was held is one of several in Mexico run by the National System for Integral Family Development (DIF), which among other programs, provides safe housing to undocumented minors who have been apprehended by Mexican authorities or deported by U.S. authorities back to Mexico. According to the Migration Policy Institute, an estimated 25,000 children were repatriated in 2015, and through 2018, Customs and Border Protection reported that some 50,000 minors were apprehended at the border between ports of entry.

Jacky and I received permission to visit the Border Youth Care Center in Reynosa and the Home for Children (Casa Hogar del Niño), a shelter for children under 18 and their mothers or female relatives. The only condition for our access was that we would only use first names and we would not photograph the faces of children without the written permission of their mothers or relatives, in the case that they were accompanied. I had previously been denied access to the Border Youth Care Center in Nuevo Laredo in June 2018, and the director of that center stated that he couldn’t risk bad press during an election season, which ended the following month. The directors of both centers in Reynosa discussed being afraid, in general, that journalists would be critical of the conditions there, and while they conceded to only a brief interview, they gave us access to interview migrant children for roughly an hour a day over a period of a week.

* * *

At the Home for Children, I interviewed two 8-year-old girls, my first experience with such young subjects. Karen sat with her body erect as she told me that she didn’t feel scared traveling through Central America. Her tiny ears were pierced with gold studs, and she squatted next to a tree on the playground of the Home for Children surrounded by a low wall decorated with the handprints of migrant children. She was from Tepec, Guatemala, and her parents lived in the U.S. She said she had traveled with her 7-year-old cousin to Reynosa, Mexico. She did not provide details. When I asked her how long she traveled, she responded, “Day and night.” I wondered how fully she grasped the details of her journey, if she had been able to process all the changes in her life since leaving Guatemala.

Karen crouched next to Katerin, also 8, who had traveled to the U.S. with her mother in order to be reunited with her father. Katerin explained that she and her father lived in Florida for a few months before they were both caught and deported. Her father was being held in a separate facility in Reynosa. When I asked her if she wanted to request asylum in the U.S. she responded, “I don’t know.” Then she explained, in the meandering way of a child still making sense of her surroundings: “We are going back to our home because my grandma was with my grandpa and two of my uncles and an uncle who has a store. And my mom was sad because her cousin died. We didn’t know, but a girl talked about her cousin to his mom and told her that he had died. I want to talk to my grandma, but I don’t know if they are going to allow me a phone call to talk to her.” Karen and Katerin sat close to each other silently, their bodies relaxed, their friendship budding. Then they stood up and followed a group of kids over to the fence, grabbing the top rail with their plump fingers, gazing out beyond the fence at a wall. Before leaving the shelter, I had Karen’s mother and also Katerin sign an interview and photo permission form. Neither of them had a coherent story, but they had shared with me what they could. Karen wrote out her name, face full of concentration, in square letters constructed deliberately, in the hand of someone who has recently learned to write. I had permission from the Home for Children to interview Karen, and I had whatever concept of consent an 8-year-old can grant.

At the Home for Children, I also met Erika Izabel from Trujillo, Honduras, who sat beside her daughters Erika, 10; Ashley, 7; and Tifany, 4, near the playground. She said left “more than anything, because of domestic violence.” According to a 2015 United Nations report, domestic violence was the leading crime reported in Honduras, but few abusers are convicted in court. Erika’s brother gave her $500 to help pay for bus fare and food so that she would not have to risk her children’s lives. Her husband gave her some money too, and he told her, “Follow your path, nobody is going to stop you.” Her oldest daughter, tall and like a string bean, looked out into the playground yard, lost in thought. Ashley, whose hair was in a French braid, hovered next to her mom. She said that she was not afraid of the journey to Mexico and explained “because I didn’t want to be there,” referring to Honduras. Tifany, ran up to her mother and began to hiccup as her eyes overflowed with tears. She started to sob silently, her curls trembling, then whispered in gulping breaths, “I miss school.” Her mother, unable to bear the sadness, looked up at the sky.

Tifany, 4, migrated with her mother Erika Izabel and her two sisters from Trujillo, Honduras to Reynosa, Mexico. She and her mother and sisters stayed at the Home for Children while requesting asylum in Mexico.

Erika also worried about the girls missing school. “They are very intelligent. They get good grades. It is the only thing that worries them — missing school. But then when I have thought, maybe in moments of despair, to pray for deportation, they tell me at that moment that they do not want to go back to the house.” Her oldest daughter, her namesake, began to cry. As she wiped tears from her face, she said that her father was violent to her mother: “He hit her a lot. He told her he wanted to kill her.” Erika, her mother, mentioned that the girls remembered everything, that the littlest one still said, “My dad is bad.”

Liliana, 19, from La Unión, El Salvador, told me that she had lived at the Home for Children since she was 17 when she arrived with her son Josef, who was a few months old at the time. The pair had spent almost two years at the shelter due to the fact that her first asylum request in Mexico was rejected, and the Home for Children, fearing she would be murdered if deported, provided her support to appeal the ruling. Josef had played on the swing set in the heat of the afternoon, and he was asleep in Liliana’s arms. Liliana piled her golden-brown hair on top of her head, but curls escaped at the nape of her neck. She wore a multicolored halter top, and she sat at a table in a hallway that connected to the playground on one end and the dormitories on the other. She talked about meeting the father of her child, a 35-year-old member of the MS-13 gang, when she was 15. “He was always violent,” she said, talking with downcast eyes about how he beat her when she was pregnant. Her mother had migrated to the U.S. when she was young, leaving her with a brother. “There was nobody to help me,” she explained, rocking Josef in her arms. She talked about how common it was for older men to date minors in El Salvador, said that you could file a complaint about it, but because it was so common, everyone, even the police, saw those relationships as normal.

“The whole time that I was with the father of my child, he did not let me communicate with my mom. I did not have a phone. I did not have internet. I did not have anything,” said Liliana. She lived with her boyfriend, his brother — also a gang member — and the brother’s wife. Liliana remembered the brother choking his partner with an electric cord and leaving her unconscious. Liliana had requested asylum in Mexico but due to a lack of documentation of the domestic violence she discussed, her request had been denied. The shelter continued to care for her and Josef during the process of appealing the ruling, fully aware that without their support she would be on the streets of Reynosa with a young child and unable to work due to her legal status.

A migrant minor who traveled unaccompanied through Central America sits on a bunkbed frame at the Border Youth Care Center in Reynosa.

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Like Milexi, Erika and her daughters and Liliana and her son had initially hoped to request asylum based on domestic violence claims. When I interviewed Milexi in August, it marked the three-month anniversary of her arrival in Reynosa, and she was still waiting to receive asylum in Mexico. She didn’t know how long it would take. She said that initially she did not think the trip on the Beast would be either too easy or too difficult. Then she listed what she saw along the way: a girl raped, a boy killed, and two gang members pushed off the train and ground to pieces by its wheels. She described, “I even had to see the rape of a young girl. She was raped there, they did … oh, poor thing! In front of everyone, in front of all the men. Obviously, I did not want to see it, because how ugly! On the train, they did it! How horrible! There were so many of them, eight who did it. There was so much blood that the whole cabin was full of blood and even the handrails where you get off the train were covered in blood.” She talked about the rape, her face flat. The last she saw, the girl was weak and nobody wanted to help her.

In the railway car that she rode in, Milexi said the rape victim was the only other girl. The girl was traveling with a boy, Milexi explained, but then added, “But there are rules.” Before hopping on the train, Milexi said a group of 12 boys gave all the migrants a talk, listing the rules of the Beast:

No couples traveling together in the same railway car

No cuddling or kissing

No insults

No stealing

Milexi said that everyone had to respect the rules, then added, “That girl failed. I doubt she was saved.” She said that the girl was kissing her boyfriend and that she wore “flashy clothes.” In contrast, Milexi dressed as a man. “I think that they didn’t even recognize me as a woman,” she said.

Then calmly, without changing her tone of voice or taking a breath, Milexi described the assault. A gang member demanded that a migrant hand over all his belongings and money, to which the migrant responded, “Why do I have to give you my things if I am suffering? Why do I have to give them to you?” The gang member then called him a “fucking fag,” took out a knife, and cut him open. Milexi said that the blood made a sound, something like psst psst. She sat, frozen, sure that she would be the next victim, until the guys she was traveling with said, “What are you doing? You’re insane. Something is going to happened to you if you don’t stop watching that.” Milexi said, “I couldn’t speak. My throat felt swollen. I couldn’t speak given what had just happened. I stayed there. I was in shock.”

At another point, she said that gang members started chasing her and her friends down the train. They shouted, “Stop, you motherfuckers!” Milexi and the boys she traveled with ran from railway car to railway car. A migrant boy in front of her turned around and told her to go ahead. When two gang members caught up to the migrant, he hit one, who then fell down the stairs and was pulled into the wheels of the train. The migrant then pushed the other gang member off the train. Milexi remembered shouting, “Oh, no, he is going to fall!” She described the train eating him up, starting with his feet, as the rest of his body trembled.

Milexi talked about running out of money when she arrived in Monterrey on the Beast. The first person she saw there was a young woman who was sweeping. She approached her and said, “Hey, boss, can I help you sweep? Can I help you clean?” In return for her help, Milexi asked the woman for a bus ticket to the city center. The woman responded, “Oh, yes, my daughter,” and then Milexi started to mop and wash clothes. Later, upon arriving in the heart of the city, Milexi saw a butcher cutting up chickens. She offered to skin the chickens, and in return he gave her 50 pesos (about $2.50) and a free phone call. She called one of her neighbors in Honduras, who before going to look for her mother, who she hoped to talk to, said, “Oh, girl! Where you have made it, many men have failed.”

She decided to stay in Monterrey and try to earn some money to afford a bus ticket for the rest of the way to the border. She got a job as a chili seller at the local market and woke up at 3 a.m. every day. “My family was very proud of me, and my plans were to bring my mom and my little brother here,” she explained, adding “so they can get away from my stepfather. He is like a super spy and he doesn’t leave them alone.” After several months in Monterrey, she saved up some money and made her way to Reynosa, hoping to cross into the U.S. She admitted that she was worried about the border, about avoiding gangs, about finding places to sleep, about being caught by La Migra. Beyond those fears, she dreamed of getting a university degree and talked about her love of computer science and her interest in joining the armed forces.

Sitting on the patio of the Center, dappled in sunlight, she turned the tender flesh of her wrist toward me, displaying hundreds of faintly overlapping lines — scars of her own making. Then she pointed to her thigh. She wanted to show me the history of her pain, and so she wrapped a towel around her waist and pulled down the left leg of her jeans to reveal several dark gashes covered by a delicate crosshatch of scars. She began cutting her flesh after her stepfather started raping her. She eventually told her mother about the abuse. “She slapped me and told me I was a whore and that I had offered myself up,” explained Milexi, looking straight ahead.

Milexi stands in a dorm room at the Border Youth Care Center, showing the scars she made when she started cutting herself at age seven.

Fleeing her home was also her first time traveling outside of Honduras, and she was enchanted by the landscapes of Guatemala and Mexico. Milexi said: “It was very beautiful to travel on the Beast. I loved it, if it weren’t for so many crimes and assaults and all that. If I was deported to Honduras and if they asked, ‘Do you want to go back [on the Beast]?’ I would be delighted just because of what I got to see. There is so much violence in Honduras that I was already used to that in my house.” As Milexi signed the interview consent form, she spelled out her name, drawing tiny circles over each dotted “i,” then she signed her name in cursive with a controlled flourish.

Milexi, like Lilian and her son and Erika and her daughters, had survived more violence at home than most of us could imagine. They all had hoped to request asylum in the U.S. based on domestic violence claims, but even if they got the chance, it remains unclear whether the U.S. asylum system would listen to their stories. Milexi ran her fingers tenderly over her wrist, touching the scars that she made to survive. And then she looked me in the eyes and said, “I have faith that I will get ahead. This is just momentary.”

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More from this series: Father of Migrants The Mutilated and Disappeared The Road to Asylum

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Alice Driver is a freelance journalist and translator based in Mexico City. She is the author of More or Less Dead, and a 2017 Foreign Policy Interrupted Fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Outside Magazine, The Atlantic, Oxford American, Lenny Letter, The Guardian, and Pacific Standard.

Editor: Mike Dang Photographer: Jacky Muniello Fact-checker: Matt Giles Copy editor: Jacob Gross Translation: María Ítaka

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