Omoa, Honduras (CNN)Alexis González walks slowly and with some hesitation, using the outside wall of his house for balance. 

"I'm getting used to the prosthesis," the 16-year-old says. He tries to smile, but an expression of sadness quickly returns to his face. 

When he was 15, González made a decision that would forever change his life -- to leave Omoa, an impoverished village in Honduras -- with dreams of getting to the United States. 

At the end of the trek -- about 2,500 kilometers (1,500 miles) across Mexico and Guatemala -- he saw hope, school, a job and the chance to send money home. 

"Sometimes we don't even have food to eat and I also wanted to get a higher education," González says. 

His mother was singlehandedly raising nine children, working odd jobs in restaurants and the nearby fields. They lived in a single room, an adobe house with dirt floors built on a steep and muddy hill. Chickens being raised for food roamed around the structure. González says his father left the family when he was little boy. 

When Gonzalez left in January 2014, he didn't ask his mother for permission. He only left a letter telling her about his plans. "I wouldn't have let him go," his mother Mercedes Meléndez says. "When he left I went looking for him everywhere." She even went to Corinto on the Honduras-Guatemala border to ask authorities if they had seen him, she says. 

González says he traveled by land through Honduras and Guatemala with a teenage cousin. They took the bus and also walked and hitch-hiked in some places. 
What was the date?
January 2014