Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/04/30
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Hi all luggers Tina is working with a project in Guatemala City where photojournalist Nancy McGirr (I think??) works with children who live and work on the city dump/landfill. The do photography, writing and other creative projects. Last year I was in Nicaragua and spent a short time with the people who live on Managua's dump. All the people in the images on the web site live and work on the dump - their homes are actually built on there. Adults and their working children forage on the dump for a subsistence living, looking for food and for items they can sell. Many fish from the edge of the dump, where it topples into Lake Managua - known for the toxic chemicals dumped there from battery manufacturing plants and other industry. Many of the houses were flooded out when the lake rose during Hurricane Mitch. Some families were "relocated" by the city to an emergency camp beyond the outskirts of the city, where there is no work, not even the foraging available on the dump. There is no formal schooling or anything else for the children and families. A Nicaraguan agency - Dos Generaciones, supported by a number of international agencies - runs a small school and provides a simple medical clinic for the children and families. They also run courses for older children on social development, self esteem, health/AIDS and other such areas. Most of the children are sick in some way or other - mild malnutrition, sores, infections of one sort or another, parasites, infected cuts, substance addictions (mainly glue and alcohol)... I did not visit the project Tina is working with in Guatemala, but from images I have seen, and reading the book produced by the project, the conditions appear to be pretty similar. For those who have started supporting or are thinking of support the Guatemala Project, I thought these images may give an idea of what it is you are supporting. My experience last year was that anything that helps such children develop emotionally and mentally (creativity, writing skills, communication skills, showing them their lives are not worthless and so on), is immensely important. http://www3.nt.sympatico.ca/timphoto/living_on_the_dump1.htm NOTE, the site is very rough and ready and the images were drawn from scans for another project and didn't convert well to web use (i.e. the images look much better out of cyberspace). So, no digs about the technical quality of the images :) Tim A