La Chureca

This post is long overdue.  La Chureca is where I fell in love with Nicaragua about 3 years ago.  Many describe Chureca as “indescribable,” and it’s often compared to “hell on earth.”  It’s an overload to your senses – the smells of rotten food, burning garbage, dead animal flesh, sewage; the sight of people and animals alike scavenging for dinner; the sound of dump trucks driving in and out all day long; the feeling of dust and dirt… everywhere.  Children run around barefoot on the same grounds where hospital waste is discarded.  It’s an area where drug addiction, prostitution, and illness are rampant.  To put it simply, Chureca is a crazy place.   

La Chureca is Managua’s city dump, the largest open air dump in Central America, named one of the “20 Horrors of the Modern World,” and home to 1,500 Nicaraguans.  The community lives in scanty houses and makes a living by sorting through the trash for recyclables.  For this population, the trash is a grocery store, toy store, furniture store.

I serve as part of the Child Sponsorship (CS) team which currently serves 37 undernourished children.  These precious little angels are provided with milk, vitamins, and oatmeal once a month and weights/heights/BMIs are monitored to track the children’s progress.  I spend my time in Chureca on Tues and Thurs mornings forming relationships with our families as we walk around visiting the community and on Wed mornings in a health charla (chat) which is required for our moms.

one of the families in our program

Recently, there have been some major changes surrounding Chureca.  First, after the nutrition presentation we heard last week, we’ve been inspired to shift the focus of CS.  In the past, CS has focused on children who were already undernourished, and we have children enrolled from ages 1-9.  However, overwhelming research shows that the best way to prevent disabling affects of malnutrition is to prevent it.  Ages 0-2 are critical years for growth and development, and if children in this age range are undernourished, the affects will be lasting and essentially irreversible later in life.  With our limited funds, we’ve decided to shift the focus to 0-2 year olds to nip malnutrition in the bud.  This means we are graduating older children who are still statistically undernourished, but there’s a good chance our program will never help them reach a healthy standard.  I know, que triste.  We also don’t want to discourage breast feeding, so while we won’t provide children 0-6months with milk, we need to figure out how we are going to target these children.

this little boy is 8 but looks to have the stature of a 4-5 year old

The Spanish government has been working to revamp Chureca.  They are covering the mounds of trash with dirt to make the area more of a landfill.  The long term goals of the Spanish include re-locating all the homes further away from the dump and creating a recycling plant to employ the community.  While this sounds amazing, it’s posing some real problems currently.  Because the government is covering up trash, there is less of an area for work.  Because the people are moving, they’ve started cutting off their water supply.  It’s a stressful time and people are more desperate than ever.  Robbery has increased.  (Manna is well-established in Chureca, and we never take anything with us, so we should be fine.  We’ve also had community members start walking around with us for protection.)  

covered up mounds of trash

Despite the horrendous conditions – through the people we work with, I see joy and hope in a place where every day they are reminded of why they should have neither.  This weekend, we’ve planned a “paseo” (fieldtrip) with our children to a sports complex.  I’ll update you with pictures – it will be a great time :)  

one of the kids in our program. picture taken at the field trip last summer. how can you not smile?