Our last week in Trujillo, Peru our team was given the opportunity of a lifetime: to serve at the dump! God showed up in that place like I’ve never seen Him show up before. Our first few days there I honestly wasn’t very impressed with the people who lived there. I wasn’t heart broken and really didn’t see the point in showing them sympathy. To me, at that time, they chose to live there because they wanted to. It made no sense because they could walk a mile and a half down the road and get a job selling fruit and vegetables on the street, working at a grocery store, or any job for that matter. The prison, which was right in front of the dump, would have been a much more sanitary place to live and while they would only eat rice and beans three times a day they would have clean running water, a bed to sleep in, and shelter from the elements. Why on earth would they stay here if they were truly unhappy?
I never got my answer and I doubt I ever will.
I asked the locals who we were working with why people chose to live and work at the dump. Their answer was more or less that people were in a sense “trapped” there. It was all they knew because it was all their parents knew. Hardly any of the children’s parents went to school because as a child they were working with their parents in the dump collecting the salvageable trash and recycling so that they could either re-sale it to the dump or use it in their own “homes”. Feeling no sympathy for these people because my ignorance of the culture was so engrained in my American way I ended up missing altogether what God was trying to show me for the first two days we were there.
Then God moved….
I began reading the book, “Kisses from Katie”, a story about an 18 year old girl who made her first mission trip to Uganda, Africa for one year. Katie ended up adopting over 12 children while she was there and built up her own orphanage so that the kids of Uganda could go to school and get a better education. Her drive to purely love the people that God put in her life gave me a new revelation that has been in my mind all along. The problem was that it hadn’t reached my heart until now.
The day after I started reading this book we went back to the dump and played with the kids. I opened up and despite the way they smelled, what diseases or sicknesses I could very well pick up from touching/being around them, I chose to love them. I can honestly say it was probably one of the happiest moments of my life because for just a few hours I was selflessly doing something for someone else with no expectation of them in return. It was amazing!
