Ten and his trip to the United States

Ten was someone who joined my homeroom partway through the school year. He was a little older than the other students because his birthday fell after the cutoff date and he had missed at least a year of school so he was put in my grade instead of the next. He was also ‘older’ because of the life he lived.

A year and a half earlier his parents had emigrated to the United States, but his older sister had stayed in their home country because she was older and had started her own family. Ten decided he didn’t want to leave what he knew and refused to go with his parents. His sister agreed to look after him so his parents left. As cold as that sounds, there were very real reasons for them to leave and trying to force him to join them would only make their trip less safe and less likely to be successful. They applied for, and were eventually granted asylum. After more than a year of trying to handle everything on his own, and his sister’s increasing frustration as well as his parents fear that he was going to end up in a gang or running afoul of one, at the age of fifteen Ten decided he needed to join his parents in the United States.

When my family left Ireland one of the women who came was a sixteen year old who took the ticket and trunk her older sister had been planning to use. Her sister had decided she couldn’t leave behind everything she’d ever known and instead my family decided things were bad enough that they would let their sixteen year old strike out on her own, knowing it was unlikely they would ever see her again and knowing all the things that could happen to a young girl alone in the world. I wonder sometimes how bad it must have been that the decision they made seemed like the best one. I also wonder sometimes how remarkable she must have been to leave the only life she’d ever known to get on a ship with everything she owned in the world and just sail away at sixteen years old. I could barely function when I was sixteen, I don’t think I cold have done what she did. I only mention it because I think most families have a story like that, where one brave soul sets out to better themselves and ends up changing the course of their family but also the people they interact with. Such is the case with Ten.

I knew something was off when I opened his file and his ‘original’ school paperwork was signed by the Department of Homeland Security. I also work with immigrant and first generation students so I’m not unaware that government agencies can sign paperwork like that. I’m also fairly well educated and when I saw where he was born I realized he must have crossed the border from Mexico and been taken into custody by Immigration and Customs agents. Ten never told me his whole story. I think he was acutely aware that his presence was tentative and his ability to stay was fragile and he wasn’t sure which adults were trustworthy. Instead he talked to the other students. Sometimes I would overhear a story and sometimes one of the students would come to me to let me know he needed something of something was going on that I should know about and usually that filled in the gaps in the story he’d told me where I was sure he was leaving things out. Often the things he left out were said dismissively, as if they were no big deal. But there was no way some of the things he had seen and heard were something a child could actually dismiss. I’m not going to get specific because they aren’t my stories to tell but I can honestly say that there was more than one day I went home and cried.

What I learned from Ten was the remarkable resiliency of children around the world as they leave places that aren’t conducive to being a child in order to find someplace safe and healthy to start over again.

Thank you Ten