The van doors opened to the smell of hot feces and the sweet smell of decaying trash. All around us were mounds of the city’s discards. High piles of old plastic containers, diapers, bulging black trash bags, broken furniture, and metal parts were scoured by people looking for items they could recycle for money. They pulled out glass soda bottles and plastic pieces. Could I ever get used to the smell like they did?
My family and I followed the American missionaries through the maze of walkways created in the Guatemala City dump. They stopped in front of a group of children between the ages of 8-11 who all had red glassy eyes. These children didn’t run up to us like the Mexican children did at the border shantytowns when we ran Bible schools the summer before. The children of the dump stood or sat looking off into space, barely aware we were there.
“They sniff glue,” I remember the missionaries explaining during the car ride to the dump. “Since they have nothing to do, they make the time pass by getting high.” Back home in Virginia, I thought I was bored if my parents wouldn’t let me watch a TV program, but sniffing glue never had crossed my mind since I’d go read a book. Looking at these children who were only a few years younger than me, I realized that we experienced two types of boredom.
These children would grow up to pick through the city trash like their parents did. With the meager amounts of money they made from trading in the recyclable goods, they would never earn enough to leave this place. Their toys were found in the trash or given to them by the missionaries.
In fact, the missionaries did their best to provide food, clothes without holes, and education for people that most didn’t even know existed.
In the morning, my sister and I left the van swatting away the fattest black flies we had ever seen and returned to the van that afternoon with flies resting on us since we gave up on shooing away flies that were not afraid of us. These flies would not budge and we soon resembled the locals who had flies crawling on their face and body.
The squatters built flimsy homes near the top of the trash heap where they furnished their homes with useable items from the trash. The dirt floors were swept clean by mothers who tried to maintain a clean home amidst the trash. Those lucky enough to live in a nice home had cement walls and a corrugated plastic roof. The windows were holes in the walls and there no doors. They collected water in big barrels and drank what was probably infested with parasites.
I returned to our posh hotel with a mixture of relief and guilt.
