Tapachula, Mexico (CNN) Rosalin Guillermo climbed through a hole in the fence of the bridge and took hold of the ladder.

The solid, hard concrete of the crossing held no promise of a future for her. Instead, she'd decided it was better to be lowered down, down to the fast-moving waters of the Suchiate River where people pulled her onto a raft of wood and inner tubes.

A man helps three-year-old Carlitos off the bridge and be lowered down to his mother, waiting on a raft on the river below.

There she'd watched as her children -- one as young as 3 -- were gripped by strangers to follow her on the same journey from apparent order and safety to seeming uncertainty and peril.

It was so different from 24 hours earlier when the mother was at the front of the line of the thousands of Central Americans in the so-called migrant caravan as they waited to leave Guatemala on their journey north -- aiming first for Mexico and then, perhaps for some, the United States.

After the caravan formed in Honduras and gathered strength on the weeklong hike across her native Guatemala, Guillermo tells me she sold everything, gathered her three children and decided to "complete my dream" of moving to the United States.

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