“They are more scared of us than we are of them.”
This was my tour guide’s response to a suggestion that the presence of circling vultures seemed an ominous sign.
How could they seem anything but ominous? We were standing near several abandoned tombs at the edge of a city-sized cemetery.
We were also overlooking a vast ravine, which has served as the dumping ground for Guatemala City’s trash for countless years. A line of yellow trucks snaked in between sheer cliff faces, formed abruptly following recent landslides.
What was unusual about this line of trucks was that they were currently in a standstill. According to my guide, it was likely that toxic substances had been disgorged by a previous vehicle and that the trucks were waiting to be given permission to proceed.
As if waiting for a given period of time would have any significant impact on the dispersion of toxic wastes.
Or as if this particular set of toxic wastes would make even a small difference given the unfathomable amounts of other unsavory items already in the dump: animal carcasses, human waste, industrial discards.
And, likely, human bodies. Those buried in previously mentioned landslides, sucked into sinkholes or caught in methane fires.
Meanwhile, even as the trucks remained motionless, the piles of surrounding detritus swarmed with human beings.
These beings, my guide informed me, were performing a valuable service. They were collecting recyclable materials to be removed from the dump, thus reducing the waste piles that would eventually need to be capped off to make room for more waste.
Our fellow humans, more than a mile away, reflected on the ground the birds circling high above them in the sky: each organism a sentient spark, searching to find a bit of treasure amidst items abandoned by others.
The stench of the dump remained in my nostrils as I left the dump with my guide, and we wove our way through streets teeming with overflow trash, and ownerless roving dogs.
I gagged slightly, and held my breath.
We pulled up in front of a gate, across from a house constructed remainder scraps, topped with by a corrugated metal roof. The sheet which comprised the door moved slightly with our passing.
And as the gate opened into the Guarderia campus of Safe Passage, I saw what Hanley Denning had worked so hard to put in place before her premature death in 2007.
An oasis; a place of creation, rather than discard.
A center of calm, and clean, and sanity, where children whose parents picked through trash piles could receive an education, and themselves be freed from their parents' poverty-stricken life.
A place where sentient humans could extract and nurture the best in other sentient humans; a place where treasures could be found.
In the distance, the vultures circled, and workers scavenged near toxic waste piles.
Here, I realized I could breathe again, and was no longer intimidated by ominous-seeming birds who were merely trying to take their place in the circle of life.
Here the concept of recycling took on a whole new meaning.
intersections
Guatemala 2011
