This is a Place for Poor People (Honduras)

[subsuelo]

This is a Place for Poor People
Conditions at Honduran Dump Explains Immigration Surge to the United States

Editor’s Note: In the second largest garbage dump in Honduras, some 200 families scavenge the 500 tons of refuse each day in order to survive. For New America Media content producer and YO! Youth Outlook Multimedia editor Josue Rojas, a visit to the dump gives him new insights on the immigration issue in America.

SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras — “I’m here because of necessity.” These are the words of a Salvadoran woman who had recently been swept up in an ICE raid along with an entire Honduran family on September 11, 2008 in San Francisco's Visitacion Valley. I was on the scene as a reporter documenting one of the first raids in San Francisco since the city's sanctuary status toward migrants came under fire.

One month later, I can’t get her voice out of my head as I walk through the second largest landfill in Honduras. I've always heard people say they left their country of origin because they needed to -- never did it make more sense than when I visited this place.

The thick black smoke of burned rubber fills the air with noxious fumes. A young man kneels patiently as the rubber insulation slowly melts away from a small mound of copper wire.

For him, today is payday. After spending three days sifting through literally tons of trash, dismantling discarded household appliances and refrigerators, he has scavenged enough discarded copper wiring to make around 80 Lempiras ($4).

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=59ee98b7efdeb93d541cd9e41836084c">New American Media- read more video content at the link too. Very good presentation overall.

[amyrose2712]

1. Unbelievable that such things go on still in this world...

sadly, these are probably the more "better off" of the poor in the world. How can we allow this to continue?

[Judi Lynn]

2. Overwhelmingly sad this has happened to these people. Their only sin was being born

in a country which has been torn apart, its culture ripped and shredded. My god.

Those poor feet walking around broken glass, rusted metal, sharp tin cans, and god knows what poisons, toxic chemicals lie exposed there. Not to mention the desperate wounding of their spirits.

Hope the struggling they survive, if they can, will make them resourceful.

Funny, but people who have struggled against astonishing odds are so much stronger, and finer, and better than the doughy, pasty, worthless, over-insulated puffballs who live in their protected bubbles, and LOOK DOWN on, and disrespect the poor of their world, like those worthless young men whose racist, classist parents raise them to go beat, and kill the homeless.

A world with room for such inequity is not even close to being right, yet.