The blazing desert sun offended Sasha with its efforts to raise her mood above abject misery. The voices in her head had been getting louder, but each carried the same hostile message: “Go back where you came from, Girl. You and your family aren’t welcome here.”

Sasha trudged blindly along the now-familiar sidewalk towards the white and yellow clapboard house which was nearly as forlorn as Sasha, surrounded only by Joshua trees and hard-packed sand on the outskirts of town. She ...