In November 2017, as Ginger walked home from school in the overcrowded neighborhood in Honduras where she grew up, something happened that changed her life.
A woman approached her asking for help. While Ginger was distracted talking to the woman, some men grabbed Ginger and kidnapped her. The men, who were likely part of a criminal gang or drug cartel, held her for several days in an abandoned house, along with some other young people. Just 15 years old at the time, she was terrified. After a few days, when no one was looking, Ginger escaped through a window.
“I ran,” she recalls, speaking through a translator. “I got out without knowing where
I was going.”
With the help of a stranger who gave her money for a bus, she made her way back to her home in Tegucigalpa (tuh-goo-see-GAHL-puh), Honduras’s capital, where she lived with her grandfather. He took her to the police station to report what had happened. But it wasn’t long before Ginger realized that the police weren’t on her side. In Honduras, police are often
“I was afraid because I thought they were going to take me back to the kidnappers again,” she says. And she thought that might mean being raped or even killed.
“They said they were going to help, but they didn’t help,” Ginger says of the police. “There is no justice in my country.”
Ginger and her grandfather left the police station, and a week later, her grandfather decided that for her own safety, Ginger must leave Honduras. So Ginger said goodbye in January 2018, just after she turned 16, and started on a journey that ultimately took her 3,000 miles away from the home she’d always known to the United States.