A World of Words

Aleyda read her own story. Then she wrote back.

A few weeks ago, we shared Aleyda's story on this blog — the scoliosis, the surgery that kept getting canceled, the borrowed suitcase, the finance degree, the roof we are now able to tell you is fixed. Before we posted it, I sent it to her first. I always do. It is her life, not mine, and she gets the final say on how it is told. She wrote back. And what she said changed how I think about the story we already told.

“There Are Things Still Missing”

Aleyda told me she had no objection to anything I wrote. But she also told me, gently and directly, that there was more — things the story hadn't gotten to yet. So I asked her permission to share them here, in a second post, in her own words as much as I could preserve them. She said yes. What follows is Aleyda's own account, translated from what she wrote to me. I have not smoothed it over.

What Nobody Saw

Aleyda grew up living with an uncle, and it was her uncle's wife who decided what she got and didn't get. In exchange for what she needed for school, Aleyda did the domestic work of the house. Her spending money for the school day was five lempiras — a few cents — and some days even that didn't come. When her aunt was upset with her uncle, Aleyda was the one who paid for it: some days there was no money at all, and she stayed in during recess because she had nothing to buy.

“I was exploited in my childhood.”

She was also bullied — at the school she attended as an older student, and later at university — for the same reasons that make her who she is: her age, her humility, the plainness of her clothes. Classmates called her “anticuada,” old-fashioned. During a training session run by university students, someone asked her age. She told them the truth, without hesitation, and the room laughed. Some told her outright that she was too old.

“I felt bad, right away. I told a teacher what had happened, and he told me they were immature, and that I had to understand they didn't think the way I did. I was never alone — God always put people in my path to encourage me to keep going, in spite of my situation.”

The Diploma She Picked Up at a Window

Aleyda did not attend her own ninth-grade graduation. She had no way to buy a dress for that day. So she collected her diploma at a window instead of walking across a stage.

She kept going anyway — because, in her words, she already carried in her head the conviction that she wanted to be somebody in life.

The Computer She Didn't Have

In her first year of secondary school, her class had an exhibition on the parts of a computer. Aleyda didn't own one. A classmate did, and Aleyda asked to practice on it. Her classmate said no.

“I remember it as if it were yesterday. I started to cry, and I told God that someday He would give me one. That was my comfort.”

When the day came and the teacher called her name to present, Aleyda told him she wouldn't be able to — she didn't know the material, because she had no computer to learn it on.

“The teacher told me, ‘Come, my daughter, I'll teach you right here.’ After that, I felt more at peace.”

What She Told the People Who Doubted Her

Even inside her own family, people asked her why she was bothering to study — she was already old, they said. Aleyda answered them the same way every time.

“Viejos los caminos, no las personas.” — “Roads grow old. People don't.”

She never let that thinking take root in her own mind, because she knew what she wanted and where she was headed. And when she graduated from university, she quieted every person who had once mocked her for starting late.

Why She Told Me This

Aleyda closed her message to me the way she closes most things — with gratitude, and with her grandmother folded into it.

“We are a family blessed by the power of God, for everything that has come into our lives — it is for a purpose. I say this because my grandmother is here with us, and she is part of this great, impactful story.”

She told me the only thing she never lost, through all of it, was her faith that she would one day be a professional — and that she achieved it, by God's grace and because of the people who were part of her journey.

This is the part of Aleyda's story we almost told without her. We are grateful she asked us to slow down and get it right.

Four Ways to Stand With Aleyda and Scholars Like Her

Give. One-time or monthly at www.hopescholarshonduras.org/donate.

Read. Aleyda's first story is on the blog if you haven't read it yet.

Share. Follow and share at facebook.com/hopescholarshonduras.

Pray. For Aleyda and Doña Julia. For every scholar carrying a story like this one that the rest of us never see.