Yesterday, our ministry contact said that we would be taking water to the community that lives in the garbage dumps. Okay, sounds simple enough. I am not sure any of us were quite prepared for what we were going to see. Rationally we know what garbage dumps are and we have all probably drove past a landfill in the US, but you never in a million years think about what it would be like to live in a dump. It seems unfathomable. We were told not to take our cameras or anything we us because it could be dangerous to have things on us. Other than that we didn’t really know much. We drove through the entrance of the garbage dump. On our right tons and tons of garbage and on our left small shacks set on a rise above the dump. We parked and said hello to the women and children you gathered with large barrels and buckets and drums so that we could fill them with water. I squatted down next to one child and tried to make friends, though I only know a few words in Spanish. She laughed as a little bit of extra water ran down from the truck bed onto her hands. There were a few little boys climbing up into the truck and then I saw her. She was a tiny thing, in a dirty pink dress. I could tell that she was a child with special needs. Now, I can’t tell you why this thing out of everything we were seeing hit me but it did. Something inside of me broke a little. I knelt down said “Hola” and kept talking to her in English and touching her arm. She just stared at me. Later as our team was leaving in the truck no one said a word. Then Rikki Lynn asked our ministry contact why. Why do they live there? Our ministry contact told us they have no other options. The dump is where they live, where they eat, where they work. To us it seems unimaginable but to them it is there life. The air was heavy and our ministry contact prayed in Spanish and our team leader prayed. In the middle of the prayer he stopped because I don’t think he could even find the words but then he said what we need to remember: God is good, even when we can’t understand and we don’t want to. He is still God and He is still good.
