Garbage Dump Angel

Traverse City-based writer, and editor/publisher of the Glen Arbor Sun, Jacob Wheeler has written a new book titled Angel of the Garbage Dump: How Hanley Denning Changed the World, One Child at a Time (Mission Point Press), which recounts how a young woman from Maine launched a school in the hovels of the Guatemala City garbage dump and helped pull thousands of children out of the teeming filth of one of the largest urban landfills in the Americas.

Many idealistic Americans and Europeans travel to places like Guatemala to learn the local language, engage in humanitarian work, and seek adventure. Most return to their comfortable lives. But Denning, a collegiate track star and social worker with degrees from Bowdoin and Wheelock College, saw garbage pickers competing with vultures for the food dumped by trucks. She saw toddlers playing amid rats. The experience changed her. It prompted her to, as Mother Teresa said, “find her own Calcutta.” Denning called her family in New England and asked them to sell everything she owned and wire the money to Guatemala City, where she created a school in a filthy, abandoned church next to the dump. 

Denning was killed in a car accident outside the Guatemalan capital in 2007, but her organization, “Safe Passage,” continues to change countless lives today.

The following are excerpts from Angel of the Garbage Dump:

Black vultures soar in the sky above the garbage dump. They glide in meandering circles, carried by the updrafts of the wind as it whispers over the hills and volcanoes of this beautiful, rugged, haunting land. The buzzards wait, watching, smelling for opportunity below them. Something fresh, or something rotting. They follow a pecking order that determines which vultures will eat first. A meat carcass. A bag of rotting fruit. A stack of moldy tortillas. These scavengers are not picky. Far below, a truck arrives, dumping more trash into the teeming filth, its contents spilling into the ravine below. Creatures that look like ants scurry around the vehicle, carrying away their own treasures.

Suddenly the vultures sense opportunity. They turn and dive down, down — passing over the city cemetery and its tapestry of crosses and ornately decorated mausoleums. Like the trucks, this cemetery also feeds the garbage dump. The deceased whose families don’t pay “rent” for their vaults here sometimes get evicted, their corpses tossed over the cliff and into the landfill that seems to suck everything into its grotesque, hungry maw. Only the vultures glide effortlessly between the filth and the volcanic views above.

As the birds sweep down to eat, those ants swarming the yellow garbage truck evolve, suddenly becoming people. A second truck leaves the city streets and enters the basurero, the garbage dump, to drop its payload, and four men jump onto its back fender and hold on. Others jockey for position, placing their palms on the sides of the truck as it moves toward the ravine, then when it stops they box out their fellow scavengers like bouncers blocking the entrance to a nightclub. The truck’s hopper opens, and they climb up onto the trash as it tumbles down. One man grips the rope attached to the hopper, swings back and forth while peering inside to see what treasure the garbage yields today.

Each dump truck bears three digits written on its side, which broadcasts the zone of the city from which this garbage comes. Could it be whole, uneaten pizzas and discarded electronics from Zone 1, where the wealthy live? Or chicken scraps and plastic bags? Rotting fruits and vegetables? Even plastic bags and sheet metal command value in these parts of the city. They could be used for shelter, or sold on the underground market.

The industrious scavengers at work here are the guajeros, the waste pickers of Guatemala City. The forgotten, the damned, the abused, the recycling class of society who make their living on the scraps and refuse of others. They live off the basura, the garbage. They are destitute vagabonds; some are drug addicts. They are survivors of broken families, of forced migration, of a civil war. The guajeros have worked here for decades. Their community grows whenever the rural coffee crop in the western highlands fails, or the price of corn and beans—Guatemala’s staple foods—rises, or when the army marches into villages and leaves massacres in its wake, forcing rural Mayan Indians to migrate to the anonymity of the capital city. Nothing is easy in the desperate and violent city, but a strange opportunity always awaits here in the abyss of the garbage dump—even for unskilled migrants.

They don baseball caps, hoods, and rags to shield themselves from the heat, the smells, the dust, the noxious methane gases that bubble below the surface, even from pecking vultures. The women wear their babies in slings on their backs. Or they place the infants carefully in a cardboard box, enclosed to keep out the sun and the greedy birds. As soon as they are old enough to walk, the children are put to work, too. Their skinny arms reach into the piles of garbage. The boys use broomsticks to stir the trash, always in search of treasures.

Here now, a skinny boy in a soiled orange soccer jersey runs among the vultures, shooing them away with his stick, and throwing an elbow to keep other kids away from his pile of trash. The rumble of the yellow truck grows distant, replaced by the sound of children playing. Three boys wrestle in the dirt, as mangy puppies nip at their ankles. The varones look no older than four, but the malnutrition that has long plagued the Guatemalan poor mean they could be eight. Raised in the dump, they learn a toughness that makes them act like teenagers.

There, a young girl with tiny dark olive eyes and wearing a flowery white dress coated in mud sits on a tire, holding a baby in her lap. She rocks and coos her sibling while the mother works nearby with the other guajeros picking through a mound of plastic in search of discarded tennis shoes.

“Espera, espera un rato,” the mother tells her daughter. Just wait a moment.

The boy in the orange soccer jersey returns bearing gifts. He hands the girl an open yogurt container that has hardly been touched. He pulls a spoon from his pocket. And behold this: a chicken drumstick, still warm! The girl takes the chicken and uses her thin fingers to tear off strips of meat, which she slips into a clear plastic bag that she places in her pocket. A meal for later. She tosses the drumstick bone onto the ground, where it is immediately claimed by a vulture, who spreads its wings and hops 10 yards away before it discards the now worthless bone once again. It comes to rest in the dirt next to a cardboard box.

There, what is that sticking out of the box? A child’s elongated arm, the hand hanging limp at the wrist. There is no movement.

********

One story, above all, shows how Hanley gained the trust of the last of the guajero holdouts who still worried that she would steal their children. That story would be passed down through the annals of Camino Seguro as a legend. But it was a true story, and Claudio Ramos had a front row seat.

One morning Hanley arrived at La Iglesia to find that someone had stolen the portón, the metal gate. They had broken into the church and taken the plastic chairs, taken books and school supplies. She was aghast and overcome with anger. But Hanley was also determined. This wasn’t right. She would find the thief and compel them to return what they had stolen. “Don’t do it,” said Claudio and Maribel. “These are dangerous gang members who could hurt you if you make them feel threatened. … It’s not worth it.” The metal gate, the other supplies could be replaced for a few hundred dollars. And by then, donations were rolling into the project. But to Hanley, that wasn’t the point. Someone in Zone 3 couldn’t just steal what was meant for the children—the community’s own children. She needed to find the thief.

With Claudio by her side, Hanley asked the man who ran a small tienda store near the church if he’d seen anything suspicious. “I didn’t see who did it, but I could imagine someone in the Colonia Landivar would know,” he responded cryptically. Hanley walked straight through the colonia, down a dark street toward the house suggested by the store owner. Claudio followed close behind, wary of what his boss might encounter.

She banged on the door. A man’s voice answered through a door grate. His face was cloaked in shadow, only his eyes were visible. His reaction was aggressive. “I don’t know anything!” the man yelled. It wasn’t me! Go away because I’m in my house.” Claudio guessed that he may have been on drugs.

“These things that were stolen are for the kids, not for me,” Hanley said in a firm voice. “They are for your kids, the children of this colonia.”

By now a crowd had gathered. Noise and rumors of a fight traveled swiftly in the garbage dump community. What would the man inside the door do? What would Hanley do?

Contrary to some versions of this legend, the metal gate wasn’t returned, neither were the plastic chairs or the school supplies. They had to be purchased again. But that didn’t matter. Hanley’s pursuit of the thief wasn’t about the materials. Whether she intended it or not, she had passed an important test. Her show of force convinced the last of the holdouts that her commitment to the people of the garbage dump was genuine. She wasn’t going to steal anyone’s children. She was going to help them go to school and dream about a better future.

                                                            ********

The theft of the portón wasn’t the only time that someone robbed the church. But the next time it happened, it was the guajero families, themselves, who took offense, as Hanley had done.

One morning she and the Danish woman Joan arrived at La Iglesia to find the roof panel torn off and tables and chairs strewn about inside. Someone had stolen the hot plate, which Hanley’s volunteers used to warm up beans and rice for the children. The pencils, vitamin pills, and even the teddy bears were gone, too.

“Who the hell would steal teddy bears from children?” asked the Danish woman in disbelief.

Suddenly they heard Mamá Roque shouting angrily outside on the street. A flock of guajero mothers had gathered in front of the church with brooms and sticks. Some of their children gripped rocks in their hands. They were ready for battle.

Mamá Roque clenched the collar of a young man who was dressed in rags. He attempted to smile when he saw Hanley, but his eyes were filled with fear. A couple other mothers clutched another young man.

“We caught them! They stole from you—from us!” yelled Mamá Roque. “What should we do with them? Should we burn them or stone them to death? Or should we do both?”

The women began to whack the thieves with their brooms as the boys wept. It turned out that, high on drugs, they had broken into the church from above, and then fallen asleep on the hot metal roof. One boy still had the hot plate under his arm.

Hanley stepped forward and quickly calmed the situation.

“There’s no reason to lynch anyone here,” she said. “If they return what they stole, they can go free.”

Mamá Roque released her grip on the boy in rags. A short time later the boy returned with a box of supplies he had stolen from the church. Juanita thought that Mamá Roque actually looked disappointed.

The teddy bears were never returned. But Hanley and the volunteers understood that the families of the garbage dump were starting to care about her project—their project. They were starting to care about their children’s education.

To learn more about Wheeler’s book Angel of the Garbage Dump, and to buy a copy, please visit AngeloftheGarbageDump.com. Copies are also available at local Leelanau bookstores: the Cottage Bookshop in Glen Arbor, Bay Books in Suttons Bay, and Dog Eared Books in Northport.

Join Wheeler for any of the following upcoming readings in Leelanau County: Suttons Bay Library (with Bay Books), Tuesday, Nov. 22, at 6 pm; Glen Arbor Arts Center (with fellow author Anne-Marie Oomen) Saturday, Nov. 26, at 11 am, and Glen Lake Library in Empire (with Cottage Book Shop), Wednesday, Dec. 7, at 7 pm.