Americans are a lucky people group. Many of us have what we need, Many of us have no worries about our safety. Many of us aren't exposed to drugs, alcohol and violence in our homes and at our doorsteps. We are constantly being driven to success by the American Dream, whatever that may look like to each of us individually. Maybe I'm just being naive but I feel like even though there are many people trapped in poverty in America there is a desire to get out. There is a desire to pursue their American Dream. Unfortunately the American Dream is just that, American. For the people of Honduras it's not a dream, it's a nightmare. Over the last few days I have had the opportunity to visit a couple of places that many people who come to this country rarely get a chance to go to, Los Pinos, where several of the boys who live on the property at Zion's Gate are from, and the city dump. Each is a unique environment with its own unique people, its own unique way of life and its own unique problems. For those living in Los Pinos life is ruled by the desire for drugs and alcohol. For those living in the city dump life is ruled by the desire to simply survive and provide for those that they love. They are separated by many miles but joined by the common thread of desperation. The nightmare that these people live every day is one that is often forgotten by the rest of the world. Going into Los Pinos was nothing new for me as I found it to be very similar to the Lonsdale area in Knoxville where I did one of my field placements during graduate school, but the dump was a brand new experience, a whole new world if you will (que the Aladdin music). I've been in landfills and dumps before but this blew my mind. I saw people working, and for some of them, living, in the filth as opposed to the US where people run machines for just 8 hours a day and then go home, far away from the dump, to their families. Several of the people that I saw and had a chance to talk to had young children and even babies with them. Even though we had brought them food for lunch many of them refused to stop for fear that they might miss the next big shipment of garbage and thus a potentially huge payout. As I watched this happen I wondered how this could be the only way for them to make a living. How could these people be so forgotten that they are relegated to living in trash? So goes the nightmare for the people of Honduras. I can only hope and pray that the brief time that I was able to spend with them encouraged them to look beyond life in a dump, to look beyond themselves and begin to turn their nightmare into a dream.
