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March Issue |
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Text Susan J. Alexis; photos by Joseph J. Delconzo
 |  Hanley Denning helps a child with homework at the Safe Passage Center, which overlooks Guatemala City's garbage dump.
An adventurous New Englander heads up a community of volunteers assisting the children of Guatemala City's garbage dump.
 er day starts at 5:30 a.m. Sandy-haired, blue-eyed, slim, and casually dressed, 32-year-old Hanley Denning looks like any other American tourist or foreign student in the colonial city of Antigua, Guatemala, as she heads for the bus. With typical Latin American imprecision, it arrives sometime around 6:15 or 6:30; Denning boards, along with locals, for the ride to the country's capital and major population center, Guatemala City.
An hour and a half later she steps off on the city's northwest side and walks through an area of graffiti-covered, sewerless houses. Stepping gingerly over the leavings of mangy dogs and the garbage spill that the children have scavenged from the dump to sort, clean, and sell, she passes a string of children hauling more home. After three or four blocks, the flies buzz thicker, vultures fly overhead, and the stench grows noxious. Seemingly light-years away from the quaint streets of Antigua is the Guatemala City dump, where adults and children as young as four earn their livelihood by scavenging. How did a country girl from Maine who graduated from Bowdoin College and went on to get a master's degree in early childhood education end up in a Latin American dump?
The impetus came from Denning's job with Head Start in North Carolina. Many of the children spoke Spanish, which gave her the idea of using her talents in a foreign country. She put her belongings in storage and headed to Guatemala in 1997 with money from the sale of her car and computer. "I said maybe I'd stay six months or a year," she remembers.
A crash course in Spanish facilitated Denning's work with Nuestros Ahijados (Our Godchildren), an organization struggling to keep Guatemalan children in school. For a year and a half, she extended and reextended her stay, having no answer for the increasingly frequent question coming from stateside friends and family: "When will you come home?"
Her acceptance by the University of North Carolina's graduate school forced a decision. Why study social work in theory when she had the reality at hand? "The children," she smiles, "had captured my heart. | A family walks past the dump after school.
I knew I wasn't going home." She continued to work as a volunteer with Nuestros
Ahijados, receiving a small stipend to meet living expenses.
In 1999, one of her housemates, an American nun studying Spanish, invited her to visit the Guatemala City garbage dump. Despite the hesitation borne of her middle-class upbringing, Denning agreed to take a look. With the help of a local priest acting as guide and protector, she toured the dump. Totally unsupervised, children were in the streets everywhere, not in school. Here and there youths gathered to sniff glue, and gangs solicited members.
The mentality centered on survival, which depended on the dump. Adults, teenagers, and young children combed through the city block--sized valley of garbage, digging with bare hands through used toilet paper, rotting fruit peels, and dead animals for anything worth scavenging to sell: cardboard, a glass bottle, a piece of clothing, a vial of unfinished medicine.
"These people were not ashamed," retorts Denning to what she knows middle-class Americans (and Guatemalans) must think. "They were working to survive, and they were proud of their work."
They should be proud just to survive. Lack of sanitation facilities, health care, and proper nutrition make for a shorter life span. Into their already inadequate housing (cinder block for those who have lived there twenty or thirty years, cardboard and tin for more recent squatters) families bring bags of garbage, which they dump on the floor to sort. Many homes are nearly completely given over to the collection of garbage. Lack of education condemns the children to the same lot.
Profoundly affected by what she saw in her tour, Denning gradually conceived of Camino Seguro ("safe passage"), a program to help children journey out of their life in the dump. Armed with a $10,000 grant and her own determination, she began.
Accompanied by the local priest, Denning made the rounds talking to families, many of them headed by abandoned mothers. Why weren't the children in school? The answers varied little. They couldn't afford any fees, books, or the uniforms required by the public schools. Furthermore, the children had to work in the dump to contribute to the family income.
Denning gave priority to providing a safe place for the many unsupervised children. Again, the local priest came to her aid, providing Denning and her friend with space in a church.
The first year, they ran a drop-in program, encouraging children passing by with their parents to come in for a healthy lunch and recreational activities before going on to their work at the dump. In the first month, Denning enrolled forty of these children in local schools, paying for their fees, books, and uniforms. At age ten or eleven, many were | Denning and a fellow staffer visit children who live in homes made of plastic, sheet metal, and scraps of wood collected from the dump.
entering school for the first time. After finishing the morning shift at school, they came to Denning for lunch and academic reinforcement. Fifty more children showed up the second month.
Her first meeting with mothers illustrated one obstacle the program faced. At nine o'clock, the time set for the meeting, no one showed up. Ten o'clock, and still no one. At noon, the first mothers trickled in. Their children had never heard the words: "Time to get up and go to school!" Nevertheless, they later came to appreciate the chance to go. A teacher would occasionally bring back the tale of a student coming to school in wet clothing. With only one uniform, the child had to wash it and put it on again.
The increasing numbers wanting to participate forced more stringent rules in the program's second year. To get free lunches and a safe place to hang out while their parents worked, the children had to attend school: there was no more "drop in service". Children went to school in one of two shifts, spending the other in Camino
Seguro.
During the second year, Denning continued to commute from Antigua, where she slept in the kitchen of the organization's rented office space. Today she has her own apartment in Antigua, whose eclectic mix of foreigners provides a pool of potential volunteers eager to utilize their Spanish. She works six days a week, splitting her time between the Antigua office and the Guatemala City site, which now serves 300 children, with a staff of volunteers and ten paid Guatemalan teachers. She has set the limit at 350 in order to maintain the quality of the program. Each child has been assigned to a social worker who links the program, public school, and family. Denning wants to keep it personal. "I know every kid and every case," she declares.
Camino Seguro boasts an enviable success rate. This year, only six children have dropped out. The big draw, the free lunch--typically pasta with vegetables, rice, and beans or soup with chicken--provides the only meal of the day for many. Besides food, children receive assistance with homework, as well as supervised sports, art, and carpentry during their off-school shift. Volunteers take children to local clinics when they get sick. Program extensions offer cooking and health classes to mothers and support groups dealing with drugs, gangs, pregnancy, and life choices for teen girls and boys.
Recognizing economic realities and the necessity of consistency, Denning has added an incentive program, allowing children who miss no more than three days of school a month to earn points toward an item of their choice--a pair of shoes, a backpack, soap, or toothpaste. In this way, they learn to make decisions and feel that they are earning what they get. Understanding the sacrifice of the mothers, who formerly needed their children to work, Denning offers them a similar incentive system. By keeping their children in school, they earn points toward a bag of groceries.
After the grant money ran out, Denning worried: "I didn't think we were going to be here tomorrow." But word of the program has spread and raised awareness of the conditions in which Denning's children live, even among locals. ("I didn't realize this was here," murmured a | These four Guatamalan boys are among many who can thank Denning for a much brighter future.
shocked Guatemala City matron.) Increased awareness has brought increased financial contributions, which, for the present, keep the program afloat. Nevertheless, the program remains on a tight budget as it struggles to feed, clothe, and educate 300 children. While Denning welcomes monetary contributions, she also encourages volunteering.
She entertains no thoughts of going home. "I used to look into the children's eyes and see the adults they would become," she reflects as she describes the weariness of a child too soon turned into an adult. "Now they have a little hope. I see a bit more spark."
For additional information:
Website: www.safepassage.org
Camino Seguro relies on volunteers to pack food bags, perform office duties, and assist with the children. Anyone interested in dedicating a month or more to this work may contact Hanley Denning at phone/fax number, 011-502-832-8248. Email: caminoseguro@hotmail.co
Monetary contributions should be sent to the American volunteer-run sponsorship office at Safe Passage, P.O. Box 1706, Tualatin, OR 97062. The Antigua office of Camino Seguro welcomes visitors at Calle Hermano Cedro #4, Antigua, Guatemala.
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