A Load of Garbage November 2, 2009
Editor’s note: This is part 1 of a 4 part series. Please learn more about Frontline for Justice, and the ministry to which God has led Paula.
article and photos by Paula Guest
What is your life worth? What about the life of your child??
In 2004 while on a mission trip to Nicaragua, our team was visiting the village of 3,000 people who live, and die, in the dump. It was indeed, “The Gates of Hell.” Smoke rising. Buzzards circling. Cattle wandering. Stench permeating. And through the haze of the smoke, people were seen standing out on the heaps, poking and prodding. Searching for something of value.
As we walked down the street, preparing to escape into the safety of our airconditioned, smoke free, stench free van, a young girl met us with a huge smile. “How are you?” I asked in my rudimentary Spanish. “Very well,” she replied. Our guide explained as we drove away, that this young girl, that very morning, had been diagnosed with AIDS.
Her parents had sold her to the garbage truck drivers so that the ‘best’ garbage would be dropped in their ‘area.’ Her life traded for a load of garbage. And she had three younger sisters.
What is your life worth? What about the life of your child??
At that moment, God reached down and broke my heart in a way that cannot be mended. In my safe little world it had never occurred to me that such an evil could exist. It was no longer possible to simply ‘change the channel, and go about having supper.’
And so I found myself in Poipet, Cambodia in an AIDS hospice holding the hands of dying women, and praying for them. Sitting in a bar in Bangkok talking to young women with a number attached to their bikini bottom. We had ‘bought’ their time. Sex travelers were buying a lot more.
