Families finding a new life settled in extreme poverty after they are re-settled from living and scavenging in a trash dump in Managua, Nicaragua named La Chureca
Families and people adapt and adjust, it’s in our nature. Regardless of the mounting unfairness and widespread oppression of extreme poverty we find a way to be.
I have been a part of the lives of many families over the past 8 years living, scavenging, working and surviving in Managua, Nicaragua. Their stories started living in a major, un-regulated trash dump within the city limits named La Chureca. Barely making due with what little life has granted them and without assistance from the government that chooses to ignore them, they are the people of the trash.
As time has passed, so has their world. The Nicaraguan government has handed the dump over to the Spanish government to profit off of as a new transfer station. In return they cleaned up the ecological disaster that was La Chureca and displaced the thousands of people that survived off of and lived inside of it’s mountains of refuse. The people of La Chureca have always been invisible to society structure but now they will be invisible to the eye itself.
Without tackling a single issue that strangles these families in extreme poverty, they are left to find their way in new places without the comfort of survival skills learned. One of the relocation spots is named Nueva Vida, a budding new trash dump to scavenge from created out of doing the only thing an oppressed society knows how to do; survive. Children face malnutrition, drug addiction and child prostitution. Young girls are pregnant by as young as twelve and left to fend for themselves. Families try to struggle through starvation, disease and a world that has left them to be unseen. New life is hardly the appropriate name for their new world.
Poverty can only be solved when we embrace it. It can not be ignored, it can’t be fixed through policy and it can’t be hidden away from plain sight. Poverty can only be destroyed when we turn to those devastated by it as if they were our own flesh and blood. When we become a part of their lives, we help carry them away from the world that has left them behind.