Quotation

Cari could not stay in Colombia. And help her the professor did. She rested a week—it took that long to buy her some makeshift papers, and then he sent her north by bus, days and days and days through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, she tying the bandages on her arms with the opposite hand and her teeth. He gave her enough money for bus tickets in Mexico—she did not have to hop La Bestia, the northbound Mexican train where gangs sell spaces on top of the freight cars, where so many fall, and severed arms and legs dry between the tracks. He gave her a note for a family in Miami. Owing to illness the family had to pass her along, to a family who told her she had to work three years for free. Radio Mambí told her that was a lie, and from there she had to scratch for it.