Ana Mosquera
The jungle swallowed the light faster than I expected. The thick canopy turned the afternoon into an eerie twilight, and every step felt heavier. My son walked ahead, his thin frame carrying our only bag, his eyes fixed on the barely visible trail. I tried to keep up, but my legs felt like they belonged to someone else—someone weaker, someone who should have stayed behind.
We had been walking for five days. The Darién Gap was worse than anything I had imagined. It wasn't just the exhaustion; it was the uncertainty. The ground beneath us was never solid—mud sucked at our feet, rivers threatened to sweep us away, and the night was filled with sounds that made sleep impossible. People whispered about pumas, but it wasn’t the animals I feared. It was the men.
On the third night, we found a group of others huddled together in a makeshift camp. A woman from Haiti had a deep gash on her leg, infected and swollen. A man from Ecuador carried a child whose eyes had stopped focusing. No one spoke of what they had seen, only of what lay ahead. We all knew the truth: the jungle didn’t want us there.
By the sixth day, I could barely move. My feet were raw, my back a knot of pain. When I collapsed, my son tried to pull me up, his voice shaking, his hands small but determined. "Mami, tienes que levantarte." He was thirteen, too young to bear this, yet somehow stronger than me. He gave me his last sip of water and dragged me forward.
We emerged from the jungle after nine days. Nine days of hunger, of fear, of carrying the weight of death on our backs. The moment we stepped onto solid ground, I wept—not because we had made it, but because I knew this was only the beginning.
We are from Caracas, Venezuela, where hunger and violence have turned survival into a daily struggle. Now, a year later, we live in a suburb of Panama City. The room we rent is small, the work exhausting, but it is life. At thirty-two, I never thought I’d call this survival a blessing, but it is. My son dreams of the U.S., and when we save enough, we’ll try. The border is a wall, but we have already walked through hell. We can walk further.