This blog was written
as a collaboration by two of our PDs that direct our Child Sponsorship program
in La Chureca (Managua dump). Over the past several years, the Spanish and
Nicaraguan governments have been working through a development project to
improve the lives of the families living in La Chureca by providing new
housing, a cleaner environment, and hopefully more steady and safe jobs. The
story they tell is one of displacement, change, despair, and hope.
I have this recurring
nightmare of people living in a garbage dump. In this dream, I wake in the
comfort of my home and board a bus bound for the city. After numerous twists
and turns, the bus ventures down another normal city street to end at the
entrance to a sprawling garbage dump. There is no sign- no marker to say you've
arrived- no proclamation that the garbage dump stretching out before me is a
neighborhood, just an entrance littered with burning heaps of refuse and a
steady flow of garbage trucks. Within the mountains of trash lies a community
of 200 families in ramshackle homes of recycled material. "Just
blink," I tell myself in hopes that the sight before me will disappear,
yet every time they remain. I watch the children file out of school to run
barefoot through the feces and dirt pathways to their homes. I fall in-step
beside a forty-five-year-old mother carrying her sick baby to the clinic. I see
wailing children sitting at the feet of their teenage mother while she sits
slumped over in a chair with blood pouring from her mouth. I round the corner
to behold a young girl eating meager rice and beans in the dirt beside a pig.
It is about this time that I wonder how my subconscious has produced such
horrific images in the uninhibited state of my dreams.
This has
been my nightmare for five months. Each time I do what little I can to reach
out to them in their pain, abandonment, hunger, and sorrow. I offer a shoulder
to cry on, food to fill their bellies, and open the doors to the clinic that
has become their lifeline. Over the months, there have been glimpses of hope- a
laughing child, a grateful mother, and a positive prognosis- yet the nightmare
continues, each time with painful familiarity or new horrors. It has continued
in this dire manner for months now without real change, which is why this week
came as such a shock to me. The nightmare changed drastically...for the worst.
This
week the nightmare started on its normal path, until I realized that in the
place of many of these broken homes were no homes at all. It was eerily quiet.
I blinked repeatedly in hopes that these people that I've come to love so
dearly would reappear before me. I ran my hands along a post here or a scrap of
plastic there trying to imagine back the houses that had become so ingrained in
my heart. I fought back tears as a new kind of despair crept over my heart. It
was chilling to behold a house here and a house there, with nothing but
whispers of all the ones that used to stand in between. Where were my children?
If there was nothing left of their existence here in a garbage dump, where had
life taken them? So many times I dreamed these people away to different lives
and out of this hell. Now that it had happened, what was the haunting sense of dread
and fear waging war inside me? I left praying that it was the calm after the
storm- the pause before rebirth and new life.
And new life is
truly an understatement to describe the turn my dreams took yet again. It
started much the same, but as I drew close to the dump the bus took a different
turn. I ended up not geographically far from the desolate picture I’d just seen
before, however it seemed so very far away in the points of detail. Rusted tin houses and dirt floors and streets
were replaced by what can only be described as a concrete jungle. I felt
apprehensive and nervous. What evoked
these feelings were not the faces we would find behind each sturdy door frame
but rather the faces that we could never recover. My nightmare was now replaced
by visions of where the cheeks I squeezed or the hands I held were displaced
too. Our journey to unlock the mysteries
of the current whereabouts of our beloved families began with the recognition
of one of the mothers in our program, Jenny, lugging along her son Brandon in
the blazing sun. I was used to seeing
her peer out of her hunky metal gate tending her disheveled garden of coconut
trees, chickens and weeds. Her house is now
a concrete box with three bedrooms, a kitchen and spacious living area; a bit
excessive for families used to sleeping in the same bed. As we walked through this new neighborhood,
the sense of community was lost as people were shut inside their houses and the
playground of the hilly terrain was replaced by whitewashed perpendicular
streets. All we could do was continue to
walk forward and hope to see a face we recognized peek out of their
window. When we did see those faces, the
same ones we had seen with tears, smiles and anguish, the feeling of relief was
overwhelming. All we could do was hug
their small, malnourished bodies to let them know even though everything else
in their world has changed, we will always be a constant source of protection.
This is no
nightmare- not even a dream- it is the reality we face here in Nicaragua. We do
not face it alone. We walk, often hand-in-hand, with the fifty children in our
Child Sponsorship program and the women of our cooperative through the messy
reality of life in La Chureca. The long awaited changes are taking place, for the
better or for the worst we cannot yet say, but they are happening. We wait with
courage that together the changes will not overwhelm us, that nightmares that
become realities still have hope of happy endings. Things are changing here in
Nica and each day we try to be a small part of the adventure.