God Has Saved Me

Chapter One


The Darkest Night


The night of August 5, 2004, was the scariest, and yet most hopeful, night of my entire life. It was a plain yet lovely evening with beautiful stars in the sky and moonlight glittering through the silhouettes of the trees—the kind of night when the ocean waves look as high as mountains. That night reminded me of my home country when kids played hide-and-seek in my grandmother’s backyard under the starlight.
Yet August 5, 2004, was also a tragic night.
I had just run away from home two days earlier and was far from any familiar rock or tree. At ten o’clock that evening, I hid in the brambles, waiting on the little motorboat to take me to the land of opportunity as wildlife chattered away beside me. My heart was beating so fast that I didn’t know what to do. I was, as the saying goes, between the Devil and the deep blue sea.
It was a night when I faced a choice: death in my country or life in another. It was a night when I looked up at the sky and identified one of the stars as myself and watched it grow brighter. And it was, most of all, a night that I hoped, more than anything, would lead to a morning that involved my waking up in Saint Thomas, an island of the United States of America—the place where dreams become reality.
As I hid in the big wildlife bush in Saint Martin, a British island in the northeast Caribbean, my mind raced about whether the boat would come, what kind of questions they would ask in the interview once I arrived in the States, and if anyone knew yet that I was gone. Part of me wanted to race back to my home, but I couldn’t give up. I couldn’t go back to the place where people openly killed one another and where I had watched people being stoned to death. I had left behind rape, injustice, starvation, a broken education system, no health care, and—worst of all—a tyrannical government.
I didn’t have any choice. I would keep running until I heard that faint purr of the small boat destined for America. And what immigrant would turn away the prospect of living in America—the land that proudly promised safety, possibility, and a better future?
Amid the sound of cicadas and the steady waves, my cousin Junior’s words from earlier that day swirled through my head: “If you miss that boat to Saint Thomas, you will be found and arrested before the next one.”