Katie Axelson is a freelance writer/editor who's striving to live a story worth telling. The next phase of her story will include the World Race (January 2014). She blogs at KatieAxelson.com and The Write Practice.
My head spun around as the mother shouted, “No! Yucky,” and snatched her curious two-year-old’s hands away from the airport garbage can.
That’s when reality hit.
I had been back in the United States for less than an hour and already felt my first re-entry culture shock.
It might seem natural for a mother to pull her child’s hands away from a trash can, but in the eleven villages surrounding the Guatemala City garbage dump, the opposite is true. For nearly 6,500 children from those villages, the largest dump in Latin America offers the opportunity to get up to their elbows – to provide for their families.
I grew up hearing stories of the dumps throughout Central America from missionaries visiting my home church. They told stories from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where a statue of Jesus stands with his back to the dump; the people living there say God has turned His back on them, both literally and figuratively.
I thought I was prepared, and in a way, I was. Things that appalled my team — like how foreigners are not allowed inside the dump and how Guatemalans rent graves — seemed commonplace to me.
Yet there was no way I could ever have been fully prepared for this. I wasn’t ready to stand on the edge of a graveyard, to look down into a stinky, dangerous quarry, and to watch 10,000 people scavenge through unstable mounds of garbage hoping to find something — anything — worth salvaging.
The day’s earnings.
A bite to eat.
A treasure.
Around the city, these people are known as The Scavengers, but Potter’s House, a ministry in Guatemala City, is determined to see them as God sees them. Terosos. Treasures.
We spent the day serving with Potter’s House as we shared life with families in the dump community.
With dignity and respect, we entered their one-room homes — the ones they only “own” by squatters rights. We listened as mothers, grandmothers, and aunts explained their greatest desire: for the children to get an education and have a better life.
We looked into those children’s eyes as we served them lunch, each one patiently waiting for what might be the only meal they receive that day. We prayed over the mob surrounding the incoming garbage trucks deep in the quarry below us, each speck a unique person who God cares about as much as he cares about you and me.
When we left the dump, I no longer saw the 18oz soda bottle in the garbage as just a misplaced recyclable. I realized it could be the source of income for someone. It was a treasure that would be held in the hands of one of God’s treasures.
And as I stepped off the plane in Miami, and saw a toddler racing toward the trash can, suddenly it wasn’t so dirty and yucky after all.
Are you ready to open your eyes to God's treasures? We're planning our next Wrecked Vision Trip to the Dominican Republic; click here to see the video from Katie's trip and to learn more.
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