If my life depended on it

I work at a daycare center, and the number one priority is to keep the kids safe. There are rules for the classroom, for the gym, for outside, for the hallways, and for the kitchen all aimed at keeping the children as safe and healthy as possible: keep your hands to yourself, don't run in the classroom, keep scissors at the table, sit down while you're eating, wash your hands, don't eat food off the floor, don't use a fork that fell on the floor, etc. Parents are required to send food from each food group in the kids' lunches, and if they're missing a group, we supply it. Floors are swept and tables are cleaned and disinfected after every meal. We're doing everything we can to protect them from harm, and that's good.

But when I went back to work after returning from Guatemala, all I could think of as I got a child a their third new fork and listened to another complain about getting chicken nuggets instead of spaghetti, was all the children and their families living at the dump.

Photo credit: Veronica

Hope of Life provides one meal, 5 days a week to the people of the dump. We went to help serve this meal one of the days, and I think it's safe to say that everyone got a wake-up call that day. The containers they used they were "lucky" enough to find as they scavenged the burning, putrid trash heaps. And you can be sure none of them have been through a dishwasher or been wiped down with disinfectant.

Photo credit: Katie

And yet, not one complaint was uttered. None of the children were whining. None of the adults looked reluctant to get soup poured into their old engine coolant bottles. Instead, they were grateful. They were smiling! They came back for seconds, thirds, fourths. They came back to fill their containers to have some for later. A simple meal: tortillas, rice, and chicken stew. But a meal! A hot meal. And they came back until every drop of soup was gone and as much rice was scraped out of the giant coolers as could be.

Any other food the people here were able to eat, they also fished out of the trash. Expired food thrown out as unfit for consumption, someone else's half-finished leftovers-- these are the options. Well, that or outright starvation. And when they find it, they eat it, and they eat all of it. They aren't wasting time debating between chicken nuggets and spaghetti. They aren't staring at a full pantry, complaining of nothing to eat. They aren't storing things in refrigerators to keep them from rotting.

Photo credit: Veronica

This (on the left) is Carlos. He's one of the "lucky" ones, out of these poorest of the poor. He doesn't live right in the dump, but in a village next to it. He goes to school in the morning, and then comes back to the dump where he helps his family pick through the trash and sort it. In this picture he is guarding their piles from anyone who might try to take some of their "valuable" items. We stopped to talk to him, and again heard no complaints. He was hard at work, helping his family, and that's just how it was.

These families spend all day digging their food, shelter materials, dishes, 

and recyclables to sell out of stinking, filthy, burning, toxic trash.

Why?

Their lives depend on it.

Photo credit: Veronica

Photo credit: Kristina

It's so hard to wrap your mind around how poor you have to be to live in the dump. You don't see poor like that in the States. I still can't comprehend it, and I've seen it with my own eyes. I've scooped rice into dirty bowls and looked desperation in the face. 

My greatest prayer is that the humility I was struck with during my time in Guatemala will replace my sense of entitlement. Because I've never had to find out what I would do if my life depended on it. Which as it turns out, may be more of a curse than a blessing.