El Vertedero

Well, it took me so long to write about Manabao, I´ve gotten pretty behind! Not totally my fault though--the whole next week was very busy, and all this week I´ve been sick. You can see in parts of where I wrote about Manabao, it looks all wierd because I was in the clinic and trying to write with my left hand since the IV was in my right. But I´ll get to that later.Wednesday the first we went to the museum and the dump. Let me explain: it was an all-day field trip to Santiago. In the morning we visited the Centro Cultural León--cigar factory, history, museum, art museum, library. Whatever--you can look at the pictures. Lunch at a steak restaurant--amazing! I think there were at least 10 different things on our plates! Then on to dump #1--an older-style traditional dump (yeah, not a landfill, a dump) in one of the suburbs of Santiago. It was roughly a tenth of the size of the main Santiago dump, and it pretty much looked like you would expect a dump to look. Big giant expanse of trash in the middle of a once verdant hill. Except, oh yeah, for being on fire.It never ocurred to me that a dump isn´t just a place to put trash--they try to destroy it, too. You could smell burning trash the whole time we climbed the rocky hill in the vans. A few houses appeared on the side of the road from time to time--presumably folks who live here and work in the trash. At the top I and a few others ventured out to experience it and to take pictures. Its like stepping into a burn barrel. And we didn´t even walk into the trash. The smell, the smoke, seeps into your skin, fills up your lungs. It´s nauseating. There was a guagua parked near us, a few random items in the cab. Through the haze we could see a couple of boys with garbage bags working their way through the trash.
On to dump #2--the big Santiago dump. Not that it´s in Santiago, or where Santiago used to be anyway: the city hadn´t, of course, wanted its unsightly waste so close to its inhabitants. But the city grew and now there´s a whole barrio around the dump, with more squatter houses going up all the time. It is a whole town, for the most part, of trash-pickers.We drove up and unloaded at the edge on the hill, where you could look down on the barrio on one side and on the other side wooden-pole frames were going up for new houses. Our ENTRENA guide stood so we faced him and the barrio behind him, and the dump up the hill behind that. He started talking about the dump, the projects improving it, the people who lived here. I spaced out. Off to the right of the crowd was a shack--a little better than a shack actually, a some of the walls seemed to be made of cement. A family had come to the window to watch the flock of americanos. It was jolted. Here was a group of 28 americanos, standing on these people´s front lawn, being instructed about them by another americano, who, regardless of the fact that he´s lived in the DR for 20 years, certainly doesn´t live at the dump. This just didn´t add up for me.I sidled over to the house and grinned stupidly at the kids hanging out the window. Someone--their grandpa, I think, had come out of the house, so I started talking quietly with him. How long had he been here? Did he like it? He´d been here a long time--perhaps his whole life, I couldn´t tell. He was raising some of his family here. Yes, he liked it very much. He said much more than this, but I couldn´t understand most of it. And he talked a bit loudly, and I was worried about distracting the rest of the group, so I didn´t press further. I asked if I could take his picture, and he smiled brightly at the idea and straigntened up proudly.The man when inside after a while, and his son appearedat the window. As the talk was ending, I talked to the son for a moment. Hed´come here two years ago with some of his kids (I think) and was helping his dad raise all the kids living in the house. He was guarded and much less cheery that the old man. I wanted to ask more, but the last of the group was already heading down the hill.Down through the barrio, which reminded me so much of my first mission trip in Ensenada. Past houses and shacks, the non-profit schools and health center, and guagua carrying blue 5-gallon water jugs. Through a little path between two homes down the side o the hill on steps made from old tires. We stopped here at a sort of creed of mud and refuse. Through the middle of it ran a little stream of black water--runoff from the trash. Random pieces of trash had been set in the middle of the creek like stepping stones, but they sank anyway as people walked on them. There were kids walking through here barefoot.A couple of local guys--I guess they worked for the landfill?--threw some more trash on the mud for us to walk on so we wouldn´t all get our nice tennis shoes dirty. I hopped through to the other side. I rudely ignored the guy who had stretched out his hand to help everyone (and by everyone I mean the girls) through--part of my annoyance with this machismo culture coming to the surface. The local guys bounded up the hill ahead of us when we got to the other side, and a few of us stood there for a while, not sure if we should follow. When most of the group had finally crossed, our guide told us to continue up the narrow path.It was pretty much just a dusty little plateau at the top. I wandered towards the first interesting thing I saw, which turned out the be the old dump site. It was the biggest mound of trash I´d ever seen--I swear it was at least as big as a city block. Just sitting there like a land formation. No smoke, no fire, no one working there--apparently the active dump was somewhere else, as this one was full.In the states, you don´t really think of a landfill as an environmental project. But that´s what the landfill in Santiago is , what we were here to see on our environmental field trip. Apparently as the city grew and the trash grew, and the ever-growing city got closer to the ever-growing trash, some of the more affluent residents began to get tired of the smell and the smoke. So for the past couple years Santiago had been fixing up the dump. We walked by a landfill in progress: it´s a big whole in the ground with poles sticking out of it and cement troughs creating a drainage system. The trash can be filled in, covered up, and compressesd, and the run-off gets disposed of properly. I couldn´t help wondering, though, when it´s all landfills and no dump, what will the trash-pickers do for work? Finally we moved on to the active dump. This one was burning and there were people everywhere. But at least it was on top of this barren hill, not in a grove of trees like the first dump, so the smoke wasn´t as bad. But it was pretty much a black, smoking wasteland. There was a sort of wide aisle between the piles of trash where people could come and go. On either side, they´d made piles of recyclables--a pile of paper, a pile of glass, a pile of plastic, and so on. Cows here were milling about--a food source for some of the folks in the barrio. A flock of seagulls was constantly shifting between the trash--looking for food, I guess--and the trees beside the hill. The view of the valley was lush and beautiful under the hot, crisp blue sky. It took a little while to take everythign in. We stood around for a little while, taking pictures. We were told they normally work in the big, old dump--this one is temporary till the landfilly is ready.
Then we were introduced to the president of the association of trash-pickers (no idea if it has an actual name). He was wearing more layers of filthy rags than anyone I´ve ever seen--and I´ve known homeless people who survive Minnesota winters. I didn´t know how he could stand it in the heat. He was wearing a cap and some kind of red cloth around his head, and a hankerchief--for the smoke I suppose, though his face wasn´t covered at the time.
He was matter-of-fact as he answered our questions. There used to be a lot of violence in the dump--people fighting over trash, over who got to work where--so they formed an association. They now had rules and protected each other from violence. The main health problems were accidents--though now that they spent most of their time in the dump where there´s no fire, it had gotten better. Lung problems? No, they didn´t have lung trouble (I couldn´t helpwondering how may respiratory diseases went undiagnosed). Each dump worker worked for about 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. There was no re-distribution; everyone kept what they found. Generally each would make about 300 pesos-- $US 8.50--a day. It cost 40 pesos a month to be in the association, and this money was used for emergencies and medical care for accidents.
I started off further into the dump, wanting to talk with more people. But ti was time to go. We headed back out and down the hill. At the mud creek, it seemed our stepping-stones had sunk, and the area had gotten wetter. The guys put down some more trash, but it was still pretty gross. I splashed through as carefully as I could, mud creeping up the sides of my shoes. As I started up the tire steps, I heard a splash and looked back. Megan had sunk a whole foot into the mud and refuse. Without thinking, I cried, "Oh, Megan!" in sympathy. As I turned to keep going, I saw the family of the house next to the steps--whose back porch was the steps--had come out to watch us. The young, slender mother, with her barefoot children gathered around her stood there solemnly, looking hurt. I was startled. I didn´t say anything. I wished I could stop and take a picture of the distain on her face. But that would have meant holding up the line of americanos, all wanting to leave the dump.

"'Good,' he said. 'Good! You write it down. Write it all down. Because I live in the garbage, and I'll die in the garbage, and I'll be buried in the garbage. And nobody will ever know that

I lived. So tell them about me. Tell them I was here.'"
-By the Lake of Sleeping Children, Luis Alberto Urrea