We drive past the dump everyday. And everyday I hope that it will get better, but it always seems to get worse. The whole city of Lusaka dumps here. The location is perplexing… It is straddled by a grave yard on one side and homes on the other. It’s not hidden or well managed, but the trash spills out into the streets and all throughout town. Mounds of trash stretch for miles and the stench makes you dry heave instantly. But that’s not even the part that bothers me. It’s the fact that the city dump is a huge source of income for many families, or should I say the only source of income for many families. But not by a organized company that pays a consistent salary…
Imagine for a moment you are looking across a horizon of garbage. As you look out across the never ending heaps, you see women, men, and children scavenging the waste for salvageable material. They dig to the depths of unmentionable things to find plastic, glass and anything else that can be recycled. The women pile item after item in large sacks which they then carry on their heads out of the wasteland. And as your eyes trail down from their head to their toes, you notice that if they are wearing shoes, it is definitely no knee high muck boot. Most are in flip flops trudging through more than just rotten food. But then your attention is stolen by the neighborhood children who have climbed their way to the top of the trash mountains. You watch them as they laugh, and chase each other around bags, cans, and who knows what else…
My memory flashes back to grade school, growing up in a new neighborhood that was building homes left and right. There were dirt hills on just about every empty lot, teasing us kids until finally we would climb to the top, imagining it to be our kingdom. We would spend our weekends and summers playing it n the dirt, pretending we were kings and queens. Then after a long day of fun, we would go home and take a hot shower, washing the dirt down the drain.
But reality brings you quickly out of your childhood memories and you find yourself staring at something that feels so absurd, so wrong. And you try to close your eyes hoping to open them and see the children playing on dirt hills. But life is harsh, and the reality is that these children find joy amongst the city trash, half naked, with no supervision, some not even old enough to be in school. And at the end of the day, many will probably walk across the street, to their home that looks out across the sea of trash. And maybe even climb into bed, still soaking in the filth from their day of fun because they don’t have running water. Or maybe they fill up their bucket of water and do their best to scrub themselves, maybe with soap or maybe without.
But as you drive past, gazing out across an unbelievable sight, the question that haunts you the most is,
How has this become normal and okay?
And so here I find myself, praying for the economy of Zambia. Praying for an abundance of job opportunities that will allow these people to abandon the dump and have an actual career. I pray for these children, that this will not become a generational thing but rather they will find income elsewhere. I pray for health regulations to be implemented, to clean up the city and make the dump a confined area that is maintained. And I thank the Lord. I thank him for breaking my heart for these people. I thank him for not allowing my emotions to be numb to this harsh reality. And I thank him for the plans he has for their lives, and the things he is doing behind the scenes that we can not see. I thank him for blinding these children to the reality of their life So they can still have fun and enjoy childhood. And I thank him that these families have a way of putting food on their table.
And I lift these burdens up to the Lord, trusting him with something I will never understand.
