Castaway ready to make the journey home
Print Edition
Pacific castaway Jose Salvador Alvarenga was preparing for a faster and more comfortable journey home yesterday after 13 months adrift in a small fishing boat, as his mother called his rescue “a divine miracle.”
Officials in the Marshall Islands said Alvarenga would leave the tiny Pacific nation tomorrow for Hawaii, before traveling on to El Salvador or Mexico.
“Most likely he will be repatriated back to El Salvador,” said foreign affairs official Anjanette Kattil. “Initially we thought he was Mexican but even if he was not, the Marshall Islands would render assistance to anyone who washes up on our shores.”
Alvarenga was born in El Salvador but had lived for years in Mexico, where he says he set off on a fishing trip in late 2012 before becoming lost and drifting some 12,500 kilometers to the Marshalls in a small boat.
The 37-year-old said he survived by eating raw fish and birds as well as drinking turtle blood, urine and rainwater for 13 months, but a teenage companion starved to death.
His family, including a 14-year-old daughter named Fatima who has no recollection of the father who left for Mexico before she was born, said they were looking forward to welcoming him home.
“It is a divine miracle, a sign that God was compassionate with our son’s life,” his mother Maria Julia said from her home on El Salvador’s Pacific coast.
“I kept thinking that one day he would come back to us, that God wants him to return to our house,” she said, tears of joy running down her face.
Alvarenga was released from hospital in the Marshalls capital Majuro late on Tuesday after a medical checkup found that he was suffering severe dehydration and the effects of a poor diet but otherwise appeared to be healthy.
After shaving the bushy beard that grew during his months adrift, he was keeping a low profile in a local hotel yesterday, with two policemen guarding his room.
Alvarenga has become something of a celebrity in the Marshall Islands, and Kattil said locals had taken him to their hearts. “People have anonymously arrived at hospital to bring him food, clothes, toiletries and blankets,” she said.
He is expected to hold a press conference before he leaves the Marshall Islands.
There were some contradictions regarding dates in various media interviews he has given since being rescued, but authorities in Mexico have confirmed that they launched an air and sea search for him and a missing boy in November 2012.
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