He received the boat he had arrived in as a gift — and he gave it, in turn, to Amy Libokmeto and Russell Laijedrik, the couple who had found him and taken him in. By accounts from later reporting, the couple began using the boat to carry cargo and passengers between islets.
## The Return to El Salvador: A Family That Believed He Was Dead
On February 10, 2014 — roughly eleven days after reaching Ebon Atoll — Alvarenga flew from Majuro to his family home in El Salvador.
The family he was returning to had, by his own account, believed him to be dead. He had not been in contact with them for approximately eight years before the fishing trip — a period that reflected the circumstances of his departure from El Salvador after the bar fight, the years in Guatemala and Mexico, and the distance that undocumented migration creates between people and their families. His parents, José Ricardo Orellana and María Julia Alvarenga, had believed their son was gone.
He also had a daughter who had grown up without him present.
The homecoming, as captured in the limited press footage and reporting from the time, showed a man who was visibly overwhelmed — by the reunion, by the attention, by the transition from fourteen months of complete isolation to a world full of people and noise and demands on his attention. A CBS News report noted that doctors described him as “mentally fragile” at this stage, despite his generally adequate physical condition.
He had developed a fear of water — a response that his doctors noted was consistent with a traumatic relationship with an element that had been both his prison and his survival medium for fourteen months. He had trouble sleeping.