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Starting a New Life as an asylee

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Hello, my name is Enoc Moises Lopez, I am a young Nicaraguan who is currently in exile in Canada due to the political crisis in Nicaragua, and this is my story:

When the crisis began in 2018, I was studying Communications at the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua, I was in the fourth year of my career, and I was an excellent student in my class group. I never imagined the life or death situation that I would face in April 2018 for the simple fact of protesting in Nicaragua.

On April 19, 2018, I decided to participate in a demonstration inside my university campus to respond to the cruel government repression against older adults who demonstrated the day before, whom government supporters brutally beat. Things did not go according to plan, because I was attacked by paramilitaries paid by the FSLN, when I was trying to defend another colleague from the University. I was hit on the back with a bat and expelled from the university along with my friends, and once we were in the street they threw explosives at us to scare us away and that way we would stop protesting.


The situation worsened the following day, April 20. I had joined a protest at the Polytechnic University, around one in the afternoon. Three hours later, we were attacked by the national police and paramilitaries, who used tear gas and firearms to quell the protests. Everything happened in a matter of seconds, I began to run away from the bullets and the gases, when suddenly I turned my head to see a young woman who was crying due to the tear gas, and that was when out of nowhere I felt several impacts on my head, which made me fall to the ground, but I had no idea what had happened, I was in shock. I had received two bullet wounds in my head, one behind my right eye and one in the back of my brain. A group of young people came to help me, and they took me to a hospital immediately, but they had to transfer me to another hospital due to the seriousness of my injuries.




Unfortunately, those two hospitals are run by the government, which instead of helping me, made my situation worse. They told me that they managed to extract a bullet from my head, which was a lie, since months later I had an x-ray, finding the two bullets in my head. In reality, what they did was open my head, leaving a huge scar of 34 stitches. The back of my forehead is sunken due to bullet impacts, and I lost mobility on the entire right side of my body.






Since that incident,. I still struggle everyday to move and walk, and my forehead still looks disfigured. I have been mocked on social media by government supporters, and my family and I are constantly harassed and threatened by the government. Fortunately I was able to leave Nicaragua to protect my life, and currently I have been in Canada for a few weeks, where I am absolutely alone without any kind of support or connections. And for this reason I need your help, to pay for my medical and food expenses while I receive my asylum documentation in this country, and be able to work.

Organizer and beneficiary

Enoc Lopez
Organizer
New York, NY
Melkin Castillo
Beneficiary

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