Life illuminates death

La Chureca is one of the largest city dumps in Central America and home to around 2,000 Nicaraguans. Chureceñians sift through garbage to pick out plastic, aluminum and paper which they resell for a pittance. This middleman then sells recyclables to a company for more. For the past two months, I have worked with the Los Quinchos project in La Chureca. Entering that horrible place is still uncomfortable. I know what hell must be like—a place where dust and smoke clog ones lungs, where the stench of decay clings, and where the signs of human destitution batter the soul. I cannot escape this feeling even I’m only there for a few hours and then return to a clean house and a shower. Life in the dump represents another nightmare plagued by the constant presence of sickness, poverty and death.

The problems of La Chureca are numerous. The people who live and work there suffer numerous health problems due to the constant inhalation of contaminated air and dust, limited access to potable drinking water, increased risk of STD infection due to the prevalence of prostitution, and a gambit of human related dangers like murder, rape and assault. The children who come to the Los Quinchos project find a safe and enclosed space with colorful walls and people who care about them. The project gives after-school help, classes in sewing and hammock making, play time and a nutritious meal – for some, their only daily meal. Most importantly, it allows them to be children for a little while, away from the horrors of their environment.

Even the most innocent are not spared from danger in La Chureca. The second week I was in Nicaragua I learned that a baby sleeping in a cardboard box near where his parents scavenged was run over by a garbage truck. The family would receive no compensation from the driver. Tragedies like these are an everyday reality in La Chureca, existing alongside the broader horrors of child prostitution, delinquency and exploitation.

Although La Chureca is always a place filled with sadness, recently I witnessed its tragedy in a personal way. A fourteen-year-old boy who frequently visited the project was tragically killed. Everyone called him Miskito because he came from the Atlantic Coast; I never knew his real name. He lived in Managua alone, earning a living whatever way he could. Like many Chureceñians, he eased the mental pain of life by sniffing glue, a high that blurs suffering and eases hunger at the same time.

One afternoon as Miskito left after eating his one daily meal, he flippantly said he was going to sell his shirt for more glue. Below, a tractor was working to clear ground in order to build a church. Miskito somehow got caught underneath the tractor and was crushed to death, his undigested lunch and entrails spilling out onto the newly leveled ground. The kids from the project came rushing out and all saw his mutilated body as it lay lifeless, just feet from the project gates.

I was not at La Chureca the day that Miskito died, but I went a few days after and was surprised at the reaction of the community to his death. There was a lot of talk about his burial and whether his family would come to give him a wake or whether the Quinchos would do so. Yet, besides a more subdued tone to conversation, life continued as normal with laughing and shouting, soccer and food. I tried to understand why these small children were not more traumatized at losing a friend in such a brutal and gruesome way, for although I knew him far less intimately than they, I was strongly affected by his death. In trying to understand I realized that in La Chureca trauma permeates daily life and that life and death intertwine until they are inseparable. Every year a child who participates in the Los Quinchos La Chureca project dies. For Chureceñians everyday is traumatic, and life is not a daily guarantee.

I have confronted a different kind of child in La Chureca, a child whose eyes reflect these horrors but who still plays like all other children. At times I find it hard to reconcile these kids playing in the pool, laughing as they dunk each other fully clothed beneath the water, with these same children so accustomed to death and tragedy. I cannot understand how those two things exist side by side and then I remember that necessity permits everything.

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Life illuminates death

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