The Medal That Crossed With Me

My mother gave me the medal the morning I left. She took it from around her own neck — she had worn it for twenty years — and she put it around mine. She said: La Virgen te va a cuidar. Mary will take care of you.

I was twenty-two years old. I was leaving San Pedro Sula because staying had become impossible. I will not go into the details of why. Anyone who knows that city in those years will understand.

The journey took three weeks. I will not describe all of it. There are parts I do not speak about, not because I am ashamed, but because they belong to a part of my life that I have had to put somewhere separate in order to continue living.

What I will say is this: there were three moments during those three weeks when I was certain I was going to die. Not afraid I might die — certain. The kind of certainty that is very quiet and very clear.

In each of those moments, I held the medal.

I do not know how to explain what happened next. In the first moment, a man I had never met appeared and told us to move — we had been resting in a place that turned out to be dangerous, and we did not know it. In the second, a vehicle that should have hit us swerved at the last moment. In the third, I was separated from the group in the desert at night, and I walked in what I believed was the wrong direction, and it turned out to be the right one.

Were these coincidences? Perhaps. I cannot prove otherwise. But I held the medal in each of those moments, and I prayed, and something happened that allowed me to continue.

I arrived in Houston in the fall of 2015. I have been here since. I have work. I have a small apartment. I have sent money home every month for nine years.

My mother is still in San Pedro Sula. She has a new medal now — I sent her one when I had enough money. We speak on the phone every Sunday. She always asks if I am still wearing mine.

I am. I have never taken it off.

I am not a theologian. I cannot tell you whether what happened to me was miraculous in the technical sense. I can tell you that I left Honduras with almost nothing, and that the one thing I carried that I was certain I would not lose was that medal, and that I am here, and that my mother’s prayer — La Virgen te va a cuidar — is the sentence I return to when things are hard.

She was right. I do not know how, but she was right.

I tell this story because my mother asked me to. She said: If Mary helped you, you should say so. Other people need to know that she helps.

So I am saying it. She helps.