A cloud of foreign children hide the pain of migration playing on the sidewalks or shelters, while their parents, some crying, cry out for help in Honduras to continue traveling to the USin an odyssey of more than two months for many of these families.
Most of the children are Venezuelan, but there are also Cubans, Haitians and Africans. They are part of the migratory wave that gathers in Danlí, in the province of El Paraíso, in eastern Honduras, right on the border with Nicaragua.
Ignoring due to her young age how painful this journey has been for her family, many boys are entertained with plastic toysothers putting together small puzzles, while some, sick, are carried and nursed by their mothers under the shade of a tree.
The thousands of migrants who are entering through eastern Honduras do not intend to stay in the country, but to leave as quickly as possible for the US, which is difficult for most due to lack of money. The scale continues, Hot Water, the border point with Guatemalais at times difficult to reach.
There are so many who arrive in Danlí, that the capacity of the city has been exceeded, for which reason on Thursday the government began the free transfer to that city of at least 1,300 migrants in 18 buses.
The Venezuelan Yeleida Quintero, accompanied by eleven other members of her family, including seven children, leads one of the groups of migrants who managed to board the last bus that left for Agua Caliente.
Quintero, a 50-year-old nurse from Carabobo, told EFE that the worst part of the trip she they undertook 23 days ago with their two children and grandchildrenhas been the lack of solidarity and the abuses, due to legal and illegal charges, which they suffered mainly in Nicaragua.
“Getting here has been a long journey. There are countries where they do help, others don’t. The last one we went through, Nicaragua, was fatal, the little we brought was taken away from us”, with undue charges, more than of US$ 200 for each one of his family.
Wilmari Gamero, a 20-year-old Venezuelan migrant, breaks her voice as she describes, crying, the odyssey she lived in the Darien jungle with her husband, her two-year-old son, and a brother-in-law. Gamero arrived in Danlí nine days ago. She said that in the Darien Gap they stole the food she was bringing for her son, and they slept around trees because they had no tent.
Karen: A migrant from Tulua, Valle del Cauca, Colombia, crossed the Darién border a few weeks after surgery on a broken wrist. Doctors Without Borders checked her wound and referred her to a nearby hospital. Photo: Natalia Romero/MSF“Since there are four of us, we had to put the baby in the middle to shelter him, so that an animal would not approach him. My son was crying, asking me for food and we couldn’t give him because they robbed us. I regretted many times having brought my son, I said what am I doing in here with a small child, without anything to eat and nobody wants to help me, ”she stressed.
The only solidarity he had was from an Ecuadorian family and another Peruvian, who gave them “some food.” In the jungle they drank water from a river where the corpses of many migrants are. “I was saying my God when are we going to get out of the jungle. I felt that my son was going to die because he had no food, ”said and repeated the woman, a Fine Arts university student who, in her country, he barely survived by selling arepas.
