by Chris Treter
November 1st - 2007

The Guatemala City Cemetery sits in Zone 3 overlooking the 50-year-old city garbage dump. The dead and their mourners watch as three garbage trucks enter every minute to dispense the city's trash at one of the largest garbage dumps in Latin America. From the cemetery, 2000 workers sorting through the filth appear to be ants in the bottom of a vast pit – one that could easily

be mistaken for hell. 80% of the workers are indigenous, 85% are women – castaways of the global economy, many of them migrating to the city from coffee-growing communities. They work 6 am to 6 pm and earn a total of 15 quetzales, barely 2 dollars. Besides the obvious dangers of broken glass, bacteria, bugs, illness, the workers are exposed to high levels of methane gas.

As I stare into the nearly endless pile of trash, Fredy Maldonado, director of donations and special projects as Safe Passage, and guide for the day tells me in broken English, “Chris we must go quickly, it is lonely here.”

Lonely is an understatement. Vultures hover overhead. Old coffins pile up at the bottom of the cliff at the garbage dumps’ edge. Cemetery guards throw corpses into the pit if their families have not paid the 12-dollar yearly fee. Graves, decaying shrines, garbage, vultures, and open caskets surround me – the place is begging to be the locale for a horror flick.

“Yes, I know it is a lonely place Fredy, but I’ve come a long way to learn about Safe Passage. Just let me walk around a little bit and take it all in.” I tell him, indignant and attempting to flex my power as guest and donor. After Jody and I were contacted by the Friends of Safe Passages in Traverse City to create a Coffee for Change coffee to raise funds for the school, I’ve arrived to learn about the project first hand and I’m not ready to go. It doesn’t work though. Fredy realized that I don’t understand him and he switches to Spanish to clarify.

”We are alone here Chris, it is very dangerous. Someone can come and rob us. Usually we have guards but your visit was last minute so I didn’t get a chance to have one come with us.” Being in one of the worst parts of town in arguably the most dangerous capital city in Latin America he has a point. Each week over 50 people are murdered in this city. 6000 people are murdered a year in the country - more then all of our soldiers fighting in two wars. He grabs my bag and we scurry toward the car heading back to Safe Passage.

Wherever I’ve found poverty throughout the world, I’ve encountered well-intentioned foreigners desperately trying to “help.” Safe Passage is a rare example of a foreigner coming to the underdeveloped world, having a pipe dream to “help the people” and actually doing it.

Hanley Denning founded Safe Passage as an oasis for the children of the garbage dump in 1999. Eight years later, the after school program and early intervention program care for over 600 children who without the program are left on the streets and the slums as their parents toil away in the dump.

Health care, meals, supplementary education, and most important Fredy tells me, love, is provided unconditionally free of charge. In a tragic turn of events, Hanley died last year in a fatal automobile accident. Her vision continues on as over 600 volunteers come from around the world each year to work with the children. Amidst, death and the dump, Safe Passage provides a ray of hope to the poorest of the poor in Guatemala.