28 de agosto experience

Aracely, our Ecuadorian ¨liason¨took me around 28 de agosto to get to know some of the people. First, we visited her aunt who she hadn´t seen or talked to in 7 years. We left there & met an older couple in their 50s who were in the trash dump site. Ara and I walked through all the trash to talk with them, a dense blanket of flies parted for us. They had been piling up paper, plastic, & glass to sell to a recycling place for 3-cents/kilo (paper) & 4-cents/pound (plastic), she had been telling us this as she tried on a pair of old sandals with a raised hell on them. They were also picking out any good food that was among the trash, like ¨verde¨ bananas, potatoes, onions. As the conversation furthered we found out this man has a hernia on his bellybutton & needs surgery. Thankfully he was selected for a free surgery at a hospital that assist low-income patients; unfortunately he can´t pay for any recovery or medicine. His wife also has diabetes and can´t afford any attention. It seems like diabetes is fairly common the poorer areas - I don´t know why, perhaps malnutrtion? But it´s a shame that all the foods that they aren´t supposed to eat, like sugars, potatoes, rice, are the majority of foods they can afford.

After about a 20-min conversation I looked around & realized I was actually standing in the middle of a trash dump, wondering how the hell I got here of all the places I could be right now in this world, looking at all the surrounding cane homes built up on cane stilts, prepared for the rainy season. I wondered why the trash site looked so torn up & scattered and found my answer when I saw our older friend help unload several trashbags off a cart of another man who must live nearby. He started ripping open the plastic bags and scattering the trash around to look for paper, plastic, or glass to sell. I had never seen anything like this… neither could I believe people lived so close to the dump, which brings me to my next house visit. There on the outskirts of the trash lived a lady, her son & her boyfriend. Theird house was literally pieced together with metal roofin and cane and you couldn´t stand up in the house bc it was so short. The story of this lady is another sad story that I feel like I´m becoming calloused to bc I hear so many like it. Her 1st husband abandoned her, her 2nd was killed by theives when their son, Panchito, was 3, and now she lives with her boyfriend, who for some reason doesn´t like the boy, who is now about 10. Now they are trying to scroung up money to pay off their $1500 land payment (with Pancho´s help of not going to school and selling paper & plastic from the dump site) and find a cheaper plot of land to buy & build on, all in less than 1-2 months before the rain season comes & covers their house.

I don´t have anything else to say other than to describe what I saw today. I don´t kno what the solutions are in these sitations or if there are any at all… but why shouldn´t there be? I wonder often if I´m called to something more here in Duran, Ecuador than just empathy for these families, the individuals, who are essentially just like me…

Our mission in RdC is to just accompany these people, not give them money; to share in conversation with them & undersatnd their situations, their struggles, & also the joys they find in their lives. Then I go home to think about how this all is affecting me & just maybe they go home and find a little peace in the conversation we shared, a little bit of hope that there are people in this world who are actually listening…