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Senior Spotlight: Keyri Romero Fuentes of Northeast High
As she inched closer to the stage Saturday to receive her diploma from Northeast High. Keyri Romero Fuentes looked for her aunt in the Special Events Center
With each step, Keyri remembered.
The long drive from Texas to North Carolina.
The $20,000 saved to cover the legal costs of her receiving a permanent green card.
Then, there is her home, a single-story ranch in Brown Summit. It’s a safe place where Keyri grew up, got ready for the prom, spent time with family and hung ribbon after ribbon of academic awards in her bedroom.
The woman who drove 18 hours to Texas, picked Keyri up, saved the $20,000 over a four-year period and provided a home for her is Martina Romero. She is Keyri’s aunt, the younger sister to Keyri’s dad.
Keryi was only 8 when Romero picked her up in Texas, and on June 4, Keyri will look for her among the faces in the graduation crowd.
Keyri knows her by a different name. Just one name.
Mom.
‘I Was So Happy’
Keyri does know heartache.
She doesn’t know her biological mom. She has no memories of her other than what she sees in photos. Her mom was 16, a new mother, when she abandoned her. Keyri ended up being raised by her father and her paternal grandparents.
Her dad died when she was 4. He had an epileptic seizure while fishing, and he fell overboard and drowned. He was 36. Her grandmother spent the last few months of her life bedridden. Keyri, who was six at the time, cared for her. Her grandmother died in 2010.
Two years later while Keyri was at school in El Salvador, her teenage cousin was home alone when their home in El Salvador was robbed. The thieves told Jessica they would come back and kill her if she said anything.
She didn’t. But that robbery convinced her grandfather, a farmer in his 70s, he needed to keep his granddaughters safe. So, in 2012, he sent Keyri and Jessica from their home in El Salvador to his daughter in North Carolina, Keyri’s aunt and Jessica’s mom.
Keyri was 7; Jessica, 16. They left in April from El Salvador and spent two months on the road traveling by car and big trucks. They accompanied eight other people, all of whom were looking for more opportunities and a better life.
By June, they reached the outskirts of McAllen, Texas, a city situated on the southern tip of Texas near the Mexican border. It was late at night when they saw in the distance headlights from a group of four-wheelers. Jessica and Keyri scattered with everyone else.
They had hoped the officers wouldn’t be able to find them. But the officers discovered them in the bushes, and Keyri and Jessica ended up in a detention center with an aluminum foil blanket wrapped around them for warmth.
Jessica got in touch with her mom. Meanwhile, she and Keyri moved to a home run by immigration officers. They went to school and waited for Romero to arrive from North Carolina.
It took Romero two months to make the proper arrangements on how to get to and from the southern tip of Texas and pick up Jessica and Keyri. Romero had to take enough time off work to make the long trip and recruit family members to go with her.
Martina Romero arrived in August 2012. Keyri remembers.
“I remember exactly what she was wearing,” Keyri says. “It was a pink sparkly shirt with white in it, and she didn’t look like she had slept in days. She had dark circles under her eyes. But when I saw her, I ran up to her and hugged her.
“I was so happy. She was finally here.”
Keyri hadn’t seen Romero since 2010. But she was so excited to leave Texas. She jumped into the van Romero was driving and immediately told her what she had learned in school.
“Look!” Keyri exclaimed. “This is something I know in English!”
Keyri recited the “Pledge of Allegiance.”
‘She Had Nobody’
When Keyri arrived in Brown Summit, she saw all her cousins. They hugged her saying, “You’re finally here!” Keyri found herself in a new country where she didn’t speak the language. But she kept telling herself, “I am staying with my mom.”
Three months after she arrived in North Carolina, her grandfather was killed during a robbery at his home, back in El Salvador. She doesn’t know if they were the same robbers who threatened Jessica. But her grandfather was killed trying to fight them off.
In North Carolina, Keyri learned English at the Doris Henderson Newcomers School as a third grader. She then went to Monticello-Brown Summit Elementary School for fourth and fifth grade and later to Northeast Guilford Middle and Northeast Guilford High.
Meanwhile, Romero drove Keyri back and forth to a federal courthouse in Charlotte every month for the legal proceedings involving her Permanent Resident Card, better known as a Green Card. Nearly four years later, Keyri got it.
Over that four-year period, Keyri says Romero had spent $20,000 on legal costs. That’s a lot of money for anyone, especially Romero. She works first shift at a chicken processing plant in Reidsville. She’s been there 16 years and now makes $17.20 an hour.
She does love Keyri.
“She had nobody, and after what happened to her father, if she would go back, who would she be with?” says Romero in Spanish and translated by Keyri. “So, it’s been a blessing to get her here because of all the suffering. We’re thankful.”
This fall, Keyri will start as a freshman at UNC-Greensboro. She wants to become a nurse. Vanessa Brown-Walker, the coordinator for the health information technology at Northeast Guilford, helped Keyri find that path.
She also helped Keyri, a first-generation college student, find her path to UNCG.
“I was nervous about college because I had no one to guide me,” Keyri says. “But Miss Walker helped me apply for college and get recommendation letters. She always was there, and she always told me, ‘It’s OK, Keyri. You are destined for greatness,’ and every time she told me that, that gave me more hope.
“I think of all that I’ve gone through. In El Salvador, I didn’t have these opportunities. But here I do, and when Miss Walker says that, I truly believe I am destined for greatness.”
Romero helped her believe, too.
“I feel her love,” Keyri says. “She doesn’t look at me any differently. She loves me as a daughter, and I feel that deep down, and I feel that when I call her ‘Mom.’”
Days later in a follow-up email, Keyri added a poignant thought about the woman she calls Mom.
“Maybe she did not give me life,” she wrote, “but she certainly has given me a different life.”
Keyri’s Next Step
On Saturday, as Keyri looked for her Mom, her Mom looked for her.
“I am so proud,” Romero says through Keyri. “She is something special. She is going to succeed. She’s always wanted to be a nurse.”
As for becoming a nurse, Keyri knows why. All she has to do is think of Vanessa Walker.
And Mom.
“I’ve received so much help, and I feel I need to share that with others,” Keyri says. “I need to share with others who need help as well.”