La Basura 2

La Basura is not only a huge garbage dump with thousands of people making a living digging through it; it is more than that.  We looked over the edge from the rear of a graveyard.  Graveyards are not so precarious as they are in the states, people actually go there to picnic.  However this back corner of the graveyard almost feels forgotten as an American standing next to a graveyard looking at this and what it seems to represent is overwhelming.  To us it represents death.  The graveyard is death.  The trash is death.  The smell is death.  It is the reminder that the world is not as it should be and people should not have to dig through the trash of a city in a dump that its inhabitants have long forgotten. Life should not be this way.  

There is something else though. Even in this dark corner, this long forgotten, willfully forgotten corner, there is something else.   There is grace.  If you were to meet these people, though they know suffering, complaining would not be first on their tongues, many are grateful to have a job, even to have life.  They receive enough to live everyday, not by our standards for sure.  Though we did not go down and meet these people on this day standing at the top, there was something more to it than the smell of rotting garbage.  I think this flower in the trash on the edge of a graveyard captures that glimmer of hope, it is not lost.   To be sure it is not as it should be, but God is here.