Day Twenty-Four, Antigua

Entrance to the dump

Today was my first day back at Casa Herrera after being sick for a week. Instead of regular classes though, we went on a field trip into Guatemala City to see the city dump. If you remember from my earlier post, we watched the movie "Recycled Life" about the guajeros (the people who pick through the garbage at the dump for profit) who worked at the city's only dump searching for recyclable items to sell. After watching the video the majority of the students wanted to go to the dump and see it first hand. Milady set up a tour with the NGO Safe Passage, which included a view of the dump and tours of the facilities created by Safe Passage for the children of the guajeros.

Cemetery from which we got a view of the dump.
Many families have crypts, those who can't afford them
rent a niche in the large wall-like crypts.
It is Q200 a year for a niche.

We all met up at the Casa at 8am and drove first to the Safe Passage branch on the outskirts of Antigua. There we met Erick, out tour guide and volunteer for Safe Passage for five years. To introduce us to the NGO, Erick showed us a special edition on the "Recycled Life" DVD about the founder of Safe Passage, Hanley Denning. Hanley came to Guatemala to learn Spanish and ended up visiting the dump with a friend who was very interested in seeing it. As soon as she was there she knew that she wanted to stay and try to change the reality the children of the dump were living. When Hanley first arrived there were no regulations in the dump. The guajeros could come and go as they pleased, bringing infants and children, and even living amongst the trash.

View of the dump from the cemetery.
New regulations have fewer trucks, fewer people, and little
to no children in the dump during strictly daytime hours.

The dump trucks also came and went in mass numbers; sometimes there were so many it caused fatal accidents. The trash pileup also had no regulation and it could get well over ten feet in height causing slides that would bury people alive. The last straw was a massive fire which burned for days due to the buildup of methane gas from all the trash, after which the whole system was completely redone; children under 14 are no longer allowed in the dump, you must have a worker ID to get in the dump, you can only work certain hours during the day and can no longer work at night, no one can live in the dump, and the trash can no longer be higher than your knee.

Guajeros picking through the trash for plastic, cardboard,
metal, toys, shoes, clothing, and even food.

When we got a view of the dump itself from a cemetery over looking it many of us realized it was "rather poetic" to see it that way. The dump was certainly something to see, in particular the number of vultures circling overhead was extremely disconcerting. Half of the dump had actually recently sunk, leaving an jagged scar that spoke volumes to the dangers the guajeros face every single day. It seems totally unimaginable that this place could have once been worse, and yet we were all aware of that fact as we looked out at the people and vultures working away at the piles of trash.
The smell was something I don't believe I will forget for a while; even now, hours later, I can still seem to taste it in the back of my throat.

Safe Passage Daycare Center.
Lunch time for the two year old's.
Once these children would have been brought with their
parents into the dump everyday, left to either wait for them
or allowed to also go searching through the trash.

Hanley came to the dump and tried to rescue the children she saw getting sucked into a cycle of guajeros. She sold everything she owned and started from scratch with 40 children and a beat up old church. Now, Safe Passage has three facilities, one a daycare center, another a center for parent education, and the third an education reinforcement center for children up to high school. All three centers focus on the Jean Piaget model to not only reinforce the students public education, but to also introduce creativity and individual thinking to the children in the hopes that it will inspire them to look outside of the dump for a model of living. The students are treated with the utmost care, receiving reinforcement in academics, creativity and hygiene.
We got tours of all three facilities, including lunch at the last (even though it was spaghetti, my favorite, I ate my packed lunch to ensure I didn't get sick again).

Our field trip was suppose to continue with a trip to a photo exhibition in Guatemala City (we changed our language classes to Tuesday evening so we could have the whole day), but an earthquake spoiled our plans. Or, to be more accurate, three earthquakes, non of which we actually felt. At the time of all three quakes, we were sitting at lunch with the younger students at Safe Passage, and non of us felt a thing, yet a 5.8 earthquake apparently shook the area. To be safe, because sometimes the roads buckle from quakes, we ended up riding back to Antigua without going to the photo exhibit. <http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/19/world/americas/guatemala-earthquake/index.html>
For the rest of the evening, Gloria and I focused on trying to get rid of the after taste from our visit to the dump.