Felipe Chooses ‘Option C’

NOTE: This story touches on abuse and a season when a young person did not want to live. It is also a story about how he came to choose life.

"Look, the way I see it, I only have two options: Option A is to kill my uncles, and Option B is to kill myself."

This is the phrase Felipe* regularly repeated to the psychologists at Covenant House Mexico during the year they spent in therapy together. He couldn’t imagine any future beyond those alternatives. Trauma and pain take time to heal, but more than anything, recovering from them requires extraordinary courage and determination.

Escaping the Live Others Chose for Him

Originally from El Salvador, Felipe, along with his older sister, was granted refugee status in Mexico, under the care of his paternal uncles. But the uncles turned on them and used the siblings to extort money from their father, who lived in the United States. When that was no longer possible, the nightmare began. 

The only adults he had ever trusted in his life subjected him and his sister to years of violence, abuse, and labor and sexual exploitation. Even worse, Felipe lived locked up, chained, underfed, forced to work, and isolated from the outside world. Years later, psychologists at Covenant House Mexico would conclude that his situation was not merely one of abuse and exploitation, unacceptable in themselves, but of torture.

On one of the occasions when, as punishment, his uncles kept him locked up for several days, he was unable to attend school for a long period. The school noticed and alerted the authorities. This was how Felipe was able to escape the nightmare he was living and enter Mexico’s child protection system. For some time, he stayed in government institutions and met other adults who let him down, so the pain persisted, and his prevailing feeling remained one of desolation. Until he was referred to Covenant House Mexico. 

The Long Road to Trust

Thin, small for his age, and extremely quiet is how the staff remember Felipe’s first days at the shelter. As if all he wanted was to go unnoticed. After his basic needs for food, protection, and hygiene were met, Felipe was enrolled in school again and began attending individual therapy sessions.

During the first sessions, he did not want to talk. He remained silent the entire time, responding with one-word answers and avoiding connection. It was natural: he had never been able to trust an adult before. Yet he never missed an appointment, and he was always on time. Sometime later, he confessed to the staff that during that period he had been “testing them.” He wanted to know whether he could truly trust them or whether they would let him down like everyone else.

After some time, the silence turned into tears. Long healing sessions unfolded in which his pain could only be expressed through crying. Throughout this period, Felipe was convinced that he no longer wanted to live. It seemed that Option B was the only way out. Even on his better days, he said, he still felt "chained up like when I lived with my uncles," no longer physically but mentally and emotionally.

Progress is rarely linear, and setbacks that destabilize a young person are common. For Felipe, these setbacks were related to important dates, such as when he left his country, the birthdays of loved ones, or anniversaries of traumatic events.

Finding an Option C

With relentless engagement, the Covenant House Mexico staff were always there, accompanying first the silence, then the pain, and later the reflection. During every session, the psychologist encouraged him to think of ONE thing that he believed made life worth living. And so, little by little, almost without realizing it, the pain began to occupy less space, and his heart started finding reasons to smile.

And his life began to change. At the shelter, he seemed more relaxed. At work, he was the strongest performer. In therapy, much more open.

Until one day, Felipe announced to his psychologist, “Guess what! I have an Option C now: I want to live! I want to live because I want to experience things I’ve never been able to before. I want to try different foods, I want to go to the movies for the first time, I want to see the ocean, I want to trade anime with others my age, I want to fall in love....”

At that moment, and still carrying a great deal of fear, Felipe was able to envision a different future; he began to leave behind the life that others had imposed on him and started living the life he truly wanted.

Today, at 21 years old, he has completed high school and is very close to entering university, where he hopes to study accounting. He lives independently and works in the hospitality sector at one of the most important hotels in Mexico City. He is in the process of acquiring Mexican citizenship so that he can eventually return to El Salvador, not to the life he left behind, but to reframe his country, his roots, and his own story from a different place. He wants to return after having built a life of his own.

Felipe once believed that his story could only end in one of two ways. Today he knows there is a third option. The option of waking up every day, discovering something new, and deciding for himself what he wants to do with his life. Covenant House Mexico could not change what had happened to him, but we were able to offer him something he needed to build a future: a safe place from which to begin imagining a different life.

Felipe’s story reminds us that hope rarely appears all at once but is instead built little by little. For him, it was made possible through unconditional love, trusting relationships, and the sustained support of the Covenant House Mexico staff.

Across all our sites, there is a young person sitting in silence right now, waiting to see if we will stay. Every time we do, we make a little more room for them to find their own Option C.

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Covenant House has programs in 34 cities across five countries: the United States, Canada, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. The children and youth at our Latin America sites are the youngest across our federation, at just 12 to 18 years old.

Your donation is the most immediate and impactful way to support Covenant House’s work in Latin America.

*Felipe is not the youth’s actual name; we have given him a pseudonym to protect his identity.

This blog was written by Gerardo Escaroz, associate vice president, Latin America, Covenant House International.