I saw the garbage dump today. It was a seething, teeming mass of garbage trucks, bulldozers, people, dogs and vultures. It was perhaps the most starkly depressing thing I have ever seen. People grab onto the trucks to claim the right to the 500 tons of garbage that are added every day. They walk along side it, almost looking like pallbearers. When the trucks dump their load, the people immediately descend upon it to stake their claim to anything that can be recycled for money, used in the home or eaten. It is not uncommon for the guajeros to eat days old meat they find, after re-cooking it over fires made from burning trash. Spontaneous fires erupt from the methane gas pouring from the dump. Garbage trucks often sink under their own weight after heavy rains, particularly dangerous because of the two subterranean rivers that run underneath the dump. The edges are filled with tent cities made of materials scavenged in the dump, housing an estimated 10% of those working in the dump. A family scavenging the dump may make Q10-15 per day, which is $1.23-1.84. Guajeros must register and pay a fee to work in the dump; those who can’t afford it sneak in on a path along the northwest side. Along the northeast side is a cemetery. Families must pay Q250 per year to keep their gravesite. If a family can’t pay, their relatives’ bodies are exhumed and thrown over the cliff into the mounds of garbage below.
These remains are added to the guajeros that die from being crushed under garbage trucks or buried under trash avalanches. There is no real way to know how many are lost, especially because many are unregistered. Death isn’t the only threat of work in the dump. Severed limbs are not altogether uncommon. People contract HIV and other diseases from medical waste. It is easy to fall in the uneven mounds and get breaks and sprains. Inevitable cuts caused from sharp edges are easily infected. Life is not just difficult when you’re in extreme poverty. Each day is a literal struggle to survive.
So, this is why I’m so upset about how we approach our possessions in the U.S. People just throw things away without a care. If you decide you don’t like something anymore, you just throw it away. It doesn’t matter if it’s still functional. Why are we so wasteful? It’s not just Guatemala City’s dump that’s filling so fast. We’re living far beyond our means as a planet. We have a floating garbage mass in the Pacific twice the size of Texas to prove it. I heard a number of times in regards to my preparation for Guatemala, “Don’t bring stuff. Just toss it and you can replace it for cheap when you get down there.” Just throw something perfectly good away so I can replace it when I go work to get people out of the garbage dump?! You’ve got to be out of your mind.
These are the exact mechanisms and processes that help keep people poor. Instead of being so gluttonous and wasteful, think of how much that wealth could potentially be redistributed if we would just really use what we have. Now, I’m not naive enough to think that money and goods would automatically be redistributed to poorer places if Westerners didn’t buy in to this culture of consumption. What I am saying is that there is a huge potential there.
What if every time you thought about buying something you didn’t need, you could send it to someone who did need it instead? Remember that sweater you bought on sale last year and has been hanging in your closet ever since? I won’t lie, when I left the U.S., I found several shirts with the tags still on them that I had purchased years before. Why were they still around? Why did I get them in the first place? The truth is, I got them to impress somebody. What if instead of falling into the trappings of keeping up with the Joneses, we focused our energy on making sure everyone at least had what they need? What would a world like that look like? I bet it would be a much happier place than the world we live in now. Crime would go down. Preventable diseases would diminish. Instead of worrying about where the next meal is coming from or how to keep a roof over one’s head, people could spend time with the neighbors. Or, better yet, energy could be focused on even more ways to improve one’s community.
That’s a world I want to live in. Sadly, I’m not sure if we have the heart to do it. We like our trappings too much.
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