The long and dangerous journey to happiness. Stories of migrants on their way through Central America

Abstract Information: With increasing frequency, a boy, girl or adolescent, alone or with their family group, leaves their place of residence, their home, their belongings and even their pets, to undertake a journey fraught with dangers that were not even possible to avoid. imagine, to try to achieve the American dream. No matter how much they are warned about the risks, the dangers or the enormous possibilities of failure or death, anything is better than the reality in which they have lived up to that moment.
The work to be presented is part of an evaluation of the situation of populations in mobility that cross the territory of Guatemala, they were taken from people in mobility, on the road, in very short periods of time, but from a depth level that moves deep feelings of solidarity as well as frustration at how little can be done to alleviate the situation that leads these people to leave everything they have.
Evaluations have a great challenge in collecting the stories of populations on the move for many reasons. The humanitarian ones are the main ones, since what is really important for these people is to move towards their goal. Operationally speaking, the spaces of time and place to collect the stories are limited and can only be done after having covered the basic needs of water, shelter, and rest.
As if that were not enough, today's stories may be very different tomorrow, because the reality of the mobility context changes very quickly and, generally, in an unfortunate way, not for the good of the populations on the move, since that every day new barriers, obstacles and extortion attempts arise that force them to modify routes and behaviors, which require care programs to have the necessary flexibility so as not to lose their coverage.

Relevance Statement: For the practice of evaluation, it is important to adapt to two fundamental elements: first, the conditions in which the information is sought, which in the case of humanitarian aid, are generally environments that present security risks, limited time to collect the information and use of non-orthodox data collection techniques and methodologies.
Human mobility has increased in recent years and in the case of highly vulnerable populations, it is important that the evaluation provide reliable data and that it contributes to making decisions that are truly useful for the definition of programs and projects.
Human mobility is also a reality that increasingly generates stigma and rejection in the environments where migrants circulate and therefore makes these people distrust any approach in search of information, which can be potentially risky or that could be in his deportation.
Evaluation theory, and particularly evaluation practice, faces a great challenge in generating timely, useful information that reflects the humanitarian needs of populations on the move. The purpose of this work is to show the difficulties, obstacles and opportunities of the concurrent evaluation of humanitarian aid. The migratory contexts in the world have different faces, there are people who only transit, people who remain waiting for asylum or deported people who try again and again to “try again”.
It is important to put on the table and discuss the need to make approaches more flexible, as well as the "acceptance" of adaptation to the reality of the contexts, keeping in mind that the most important thing is timely and useful data.