By Ilka Oliva-Corado on April 25, 2022
photo: Bill Hackwell
Begoña wraps herself in a blanket that she grabs from the living room couch and walks down the steps of the building; she lives on the third floor. She starts the car and returns to her apartment, pours four spoonfuls of coffee in the coffee pot and two cups of water, as soon as the coffee is ready she goes to take a bath with cold water to finish waking up, the clock shows a quarter past three in the morning. It is Saturday, early spring, at the restaurant she is expected at four o’clock.
She pulls her still wet hair into a ponytail, puts on her uniform in a rush, pours her coffee in a glass, grabs her bag and opens the apartment door carefully so as not to wake the neighbors, in the same way she locks the key and walks down the steps of the building, the cold air of the early morning soaks her hands in arthritis, she gets into the car and leaves. On the way she makes up a towel that she keeps in a hole in front of her through which the cold wind blows on her feet.
She enters the building where she works, goes down to the basement where she spends the next 16 hours with other undocumented workers chopping vegetables and packing food, leaving at 8 p.m. She has missed the first day of sunshine. She has missed the first sunny day of spring and will miss those of summer and fall just as she has missed them the last 14 years of her life since she arrived in the United States.
14 years in which her three children have been waiting for her in her native Santa Ana de Yusguare, Choluteca, Honduras.
Source: Ilka Oliva-Corardo’s blog