Omoa, Honduras (CNN)Alexis Gonzalez 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, Gonzalez 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," Gonzalez 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. Gonzalez 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 Melendez 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.

Gonzalez 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.

Answer this series of questions:

1. Who is the article about?
2. How old is he?
3. Where's he from?
4. Where did he want to go?
5. Why?
6. What was his home like?
7. When did he leave?
8. What was the date?
9. Did he go alone?
10. Who went with him?
11. Did his family approve?
12. Who did he live with?
13. Who else?
14. What happened to his dad?
15. Where was he?
16. Did the trip go well?
17. How do we know?
18. What does he have to use?
19. How far was the journey?
20. What transportation did they use?
1. Alexis Gonzalez
2. 16
3. Omoa
4. United States
5. hope, school, a job and the chance to send money home
6. impoverished
7. When he was 15
8. January 2014
9. no
10. teenage cousin
11. no
12. nine children
13. His mother
14. his father
15. his father left
16. no
17. expression of sadness
18. the prosthesis
19. 2,500 kilometers
20. the bus