Life in a Landfill
BY ANNA-CAT BRIGIDA
Large plastic bags filled with recyclables block the doorway to Maria Cedillo’s tin-roofed house on the outskirts of Guatemala City’s vermin-infested landfill, which is the size of eight soccer fields. The petite Mayan woman has just finished sorting through valuables from her earlier scavenging, materials like plastic, glass, and aluminum that she can sell for a small profit. For decades, Guatemala’s most desperate have set up camp near the capital’s basurero, or dump. From the public cemetery overlooking the heaps of trash, vultures sit perched in a leafless tree, scowling at the yellow garbage trucks that form a serpentine line to discard the city’s refuse. Trash pickers—guajeros in Spanish—stand ready to pounce on the newest shipment of goods.
In cities around the world, from Rio to Manila, thousands live and work in garbage dumps as a last resort. This is Cedillo’s workplace, where the mother of four digs through mountains of trash with her bare hands, always mindful to avoid the scuffles that often break out over garbage from wealthier neighborhoods. On a recent cloudy morning, the stifling smell was intensified by the heavy rainfall of the day before, a common occurrence during the rainy season from May to October. Cedillo, with caramel skin and long, sleek black hair, never intended to work in Guatemala City’s dump, where she must wear a mask just to bear the choking smell.
Around 6 a.m., Cedillo gets up from the bottom bunk bed she shares with her daughters and starts making breakfast: eggs and beans if she has the money, just coffee if she doesn’t. Between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m., the kids leave for school, exiting the black door to the family’s home and walking up a dirt road. Once they are gone, Cedillo dresses in jeans, tennis shoes, and a hoodie. Then, she heads off in the opposite direction, navigating through laundry lines and alleys lined with bags of recyclables down to the dump, a ravine with eight levels of trash, some of which are disappearing due to landslides. With hands weathered by more than a decade of trash picking, Cedillo scavenges through part of the three tons of garbage that arrive each day. She mainly collects glass, aluminum, and plastic, and has never been lucky enough to find an old cellphone or lost ring. For the past twelve years, Cedillo has followed the same routine without variation.
Like thousands in Guatemala, where nearly 60 percent of the population lives in poverty, working in the dump was the only option for the young mother with indigenous roots who moved to the capital in search of work. With no other connections besides a friend from home living near the basurero, she fell into the daily routine of trash picking. “If I don’t work in the basurero, there’s no way to feed my kids,” says Cedillo, who, at 32, is already showing wrinkles around her eyes and forehead from long days outside in the sun. “That’s the only way I make money.”
In this, one of Central America’s largest dumps, trash pickers often suffer infections from needles or scraps of metal while picking through trash without gloves. Gangs have started to build a presence in the neighborhood, also known as basurero, leading to more shootouts and a higher rate of extortion. Before, residents often heard the sound of glass bottles knocking together as guajeros transported their daily findings back home through the small alleyways; now, they often hear gunshots.
Read more: http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2016/life-in-a-landfill/
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