After I turned 15, in January 1979,
my parents gave me a present, and it
was to be able to go to the United States
to visit my aunt in New York.
So I went there, and I spent a few months there.
And my aunt made the arrangement so I could go to this school,
but it was really like an adult school.
But it was amazing because I was there
the whole day learning English, and it
was a great experience for me.
But in Nicaragua, there had been some kind of political unrest
that had been going on for years,
but it was getting worse and worse.
And the news were just terrible, you know?
I was so worried about my family.
I was just 15, and I really didn't
want to be away from them while they were
going through these hard times.
When I went back to Nicaragua, things
were getting really bad because there
had been these rebels that had been fighting for years
to throw down the government.
There was a point at which they decided
to bomb that part of the city to put more pressure on the rebels
so they would leave.
At that moment, all the radio stations in Nicaragua
were censored.
They were shut down.
So we didn't know exactly what was going on.
But then at night, we would try to listen to the radio stations
from Costa Rica, and they would tell us what was going on
and how many people had died that day, how many families.
And I knew that there were children,
children dying from that.
And then again, the next day, it would happen again,
and we would just watch that in horror.
[GUNFIRE]
[RIOTING]
At night we would put our mattresses on the floor,
and we would sleep there, just hoping that we
would be safe from the bullets.
And I remember thinking, "OK, there are people dying;
there are children dying right now."
And I would ask in my heart the question
"Why does God allow this to happen?
Why doesn't He do anything to stop this?"
And it was very hard.
I was not upset with God, but I just
had that question, you know, in my heart.
Fortunately, something happened and the problem stopped,
and the president left the country.
I remember vividly that day after the president
of the country left and the rebels were just
celebrating out in the streets, the victory.
You know, I think I have never lived another day like that
in which everybody was just happy, feeling this joy
that our problems were over.
When I was about 16 or 17 I started attending college.
And I went to Universidad Centroamericana,
and my major was industrial engineering.
I always liked learning and, you know, getting an education.
And it was a good school, but the situation in Nicaragua
was just getting worse and worse and worse.
So in 1984 I decided to marry a young man that I was dating.
I had been dating him for years, and we just
decided to get married.
And we moved to San Francisco, California,
where we both had family.
My mother and my siblings came to join us, like,
a year after I left.
But you know, it was not easy to start
a new life in a new country because of the language,
the climate, even though we had work.
We were blessed to have work; we always had work.
And for about two years in my marriage, everything was fine.
We had a baby around two years after we got married.
It was our son, Javier, who was born there.
And he gave me a reason to keep going
and to have hope for the future.
When our son was, like, six months old,
my husband lost the job that he had that was very stable.
And I really don't know how everything started.
You know, he--even from the time we were dating,
I knew that he drank alcohol and that he even smoked a little
bit of marijuana, but it was never too bad.
But after he lost that job, like,
two and a half years into our marriage,
things just went downhill from that moment.
After that, he tried to get a job; he could not find a job,
and he just got into drugs, heavily.
So those years were very hard--very,
very hard to see him going down, down and down,
little by little, and having this fear and having this love
for my son, and knowing that I needed to protect him,
and it was my responsibility to look after him.
I looked for jobs in which I could actually
take my son with me so I could make a living
and be with him at the same time.
So I would work as a nanny during the day,
and I went to school at night because I always
wanted to expand my education, you know,
to have a better future.
It was very hard for me to see the man
that I loved, the father of my son, going into that trap.
And I remember that there were times, even,
when I would see him on the street,
and I would stop him to talk to him,
and he wouldn't even recognize me.
He wouldn't even know that it was me.
He was totally lost.
I tried to help him.
I tried talking to him.
I went to therapy.
I went to the Alcoholics Anonymous organization
to look for help.
I tried to do everything that I could to help him.
But I feel that I ...
I was failing.
I could not help him.
One evening I remember walking to the bus stop
because I was going to school.
And then I forgot something, a book or something.
I needed to go back to our apartment to get it.
So I walked back to my apartment,
and as I was getting close to it,
I noticed that there was a car parked right in front of it.
And I noticed that it was full of men;
there were at least five men inside that car.
And it was full of smoke.
And for some reason I looked closer,
and I thought, "What are they doing?"
And then when I looked inside the car,
there was a little boy in there, and that boy was my son.
My baby.
And I got so upset.
I pounded on the window, and I opened that door
and I told him, "Give me my son.
This is the last time that you do this to him."
So that day was the day when I decided to end my marriage.
I think that was the day when I actually
stopped loving my husband, because I realized
that I could not trust him.
I could not even trust my son to him.
It was very hard to end the relationship.
How do you do that, you know, after being
so many years with a person?
Those days after he left, of course,
it was better without him.
But at the same time, I had fear.
I feared that he would come back.
I feared that I would not be able to give
my son a stable environment, that he could also
fall into that trap as he would grow up, and I was desperate.
I was hopeless.
It was really hard.
Those days were times of despair for me, not knowing what to do.
People make choices, and that freedom to make choices
comes from God.
He has given us that freedom, and that is why He cannot stop
people from doing bad things.
And I know that it happens in our life
sometimes that we have these longings,
we have these questions, we have these things that we
don't really know the reason.
But if we are patient, the answer will come one day,
and then we will finally have that peace
that we are looking for.