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This week I visited the dump. For all of my big talk about how much I love garbage and have a passion for trash, I am ashamed to say that I haven't been to a landfill since I was a kid. I had the opportunity to visit the municipal basurero of Oaxaca, located beside Colonia Renacimiento (the neighborhood of rebirth), because of my friends Jose Carlos and Aurelia. They started an organization called SiKanda (Solidaridad Internacional Kanda) that works with some of the folks that live in Renacimiento, the pepenadores. These are the hearty souls that sort through the thousands of kilos of trash that arrive at the dump every day and separate out materials that can be sold and recycled (or upcycled, I suppose).

I had been wanting to visit the basurero in Oaxaca for about a year and a half and to meet some of the pepenadores that I had heard so much about. I was very excited. But as we came around the corner and I saw that giant monstrous mountain of refuse I have to admit I felt a little overwhelmed. Like woah! Here it is, Aerin, right in your face. Poptab purses and magazine bowls are nice, but this is the real deal-i-o! Not a statistic, not a number on a page but a mountain of trash that I have been contributing to for the past two and a half years. WOAH! 

We visited the dump to do some work on a project building "eco-casas" for some of the pepenador families that live in a hodge podge collection of structures (mostly made out of sheet metal and concrete) right across from the massive pile. The houses that SiKanda and others are building are cool because they are made of trash. The structure is all new materials (wooden framing, Styrofoam-type roofing, prefab windows, etc) but the walls are made with tetrapak. Tetrapak is that aluminum lined cardboard that a lot liquids here in Mexico are sold in, most commonly, milk. So we were stapling opened, cleaned milk boxes to make the walls and then filling them with plastic bottles to give them a bit more strength. A couple of builders then wrap the whole house up with chicken wire, slap a couple coats of cement on it, paint it and voila! instant eco-house. 

Anyway, I have lots of reflections on that whole project ... but that's not what is most alive in me after my dump visit. What I am most interested in as a result of this experience is learning about people around the world that live and, at least to some degree, see that trash is their medium. It's what they work in. The idea that people can have pride in this work, is something that has just recently become clear to me (from a clip of a film called "Garbage Dreams" about trash pickers in Cairo). So these are people I'd like to talk with more. To get to know and to understand. Because I know that if I say that trash is my passion, I need to be ready and willing to deal with it in this, its rawest and most ominous form - en masse. 

I have to say that I was still intimidated by it all - the smells, the filth, the living conditions, and just the overwhelm of STUFF everywhere, stuff salvaged from the massive, buzzard magnet of a pile. But somehow these people have learned to navigate it, live from it and I am sure that it may be an interesting life, a totally distinct way of being and seeing things. Some of these families have been pepenedores for generations now. This is their trade. My question is what do we, the society at large, have to learn from this way of walking through the world? I believe that these kinds of people exist around the globe. I want to know them more.

The other thing I found so amazing is just the way that in their world the line between what is trash and what is not is utterly not present. The distinction seems almost impossible to know because garbage, of every type, is literally infused into everything around you - mixed into the dirt below your feet, filling the enormous plastic bags that line the little space around each family's home, it is EVERYWHERE! - gates made of the wire frame of a box spring. So that blurring of the line between what is garbage and what is not is also of utmost interest to me.

I had one final observation. Most of the houses I saw and visited seemed to me a series of chaotic piles of refuse. In some cases, trash was separated according to it's type. In others I saw no apparent system. And in the one house I actually entered this chaos continued. Valuable metal pieces or other things that might fetch a higher price on the market were stored inside. But the level of disorder remained the same.

But there was one house, a neat little place with flowers growing toward the back, in which everything was organized so well. The patio was open, even the remnants of grass seemed green to me, the enormous bags of recyclables stacked neatly against the fence. I looked at that and I thought: what are the conditions that instigated this one family to live in this way, while the rest seem to live in what appears to me to be a total mess! What does it take? How did it happen? Who are those people?

I know that my affiliation for the organized house is just related to my own anal retentiveness ... but putting aside all judgment ... I am just so curious about how one house out of hundreds ended up like this one. What makes the difference?

What else might I learn on my next visit to Colonia Renacimiento? I know for sure I'll be back out there to see what I can find out about rebirth in this incredibly intense environment.

Photos courtesy of SiKanda. See the full gallery of photos on the portal here.