THE SERVANT'S HEART
A ministry at Guatemala City's dump.

Scavengers wait expectantly for the daily load of Guatemala City's garbage to be unloaded.

Racing Against Borrowed Time

Using a steel bar, Claudia Nunez, 7, searches for paper and food. The paper is sold to recyclers. Claudia, her mother and younger sister make their home in the dump. Dirt-floor shacks are constructed of cardboard, sheets of plastic and discarded wood. The dump where Claudia and her family live is one of the largest in the world and one of the worst in Latin America.

y the time the sun is a glimpse on the Guatemalan horizon, an army of workers has already begun their descent into the garbage from their homes built alongside the dump, atop the compacted trash.

Looming to the west, the towering volcano, Agua, rests like a sleeping sentry.

The mountainous terrain and the majesty of Agua is a panorama tourists pay handsomely to view.

Those in the dump don’t take the time to savor the view. It is beyond what they can imagine and they seem overpowered by the immediacy of their surroundings and their struggle to survive.

The ground inside the dump smokes from invisible fires that swallow homes and workers without warning.

Hunched over in the backbreaking repetition of digging for garbage, the workers seem oblivious to the vista just beyond the cement barricades that shroud the view of the dump from outsiders.

This is the bottom rung of civilization.

Workers are mostly women. Babies and toddlers too young to work are placed in discarded tires and cardboard boxes and covered with tom plastic bags to protect them from the sun and from the thousands of turkey-sized vultures that hover on the air currents and alight to scavenge with the workers.

There is little to protect the children from the invisible hazards in the dump the germs that are pervasive in the human waste, discarded food, contaminated plastics and cardboard.

The birds fear no one and will openly fight a child for a rotten avocado or a half-eaten melon. More often than not, the vultures win.

There is no safety net for the people in the dump, no government aid.

Stigmatized by society, the people cluster together out of necessity. They operate independently out of fear. If they don’t work, they know they will die.

Death comes often to the young who live amid the garbage. More than half of those who work in the dump are children.

There is no safe drinking water; sanitation is nearly non-existent.

Sometimes death is self-inflicted.

Violence is rampant. Gangs prey on the vulnerability of those who live there. They kill and maim simply because they can. So do the police. There are no police patrols, no justice for those who are poor.

Alcoholism is the escape drug of choice for adults; cobbler’s glue is the only choice for children.

Glue is affordable, easy to obtain and even easier to use.

Fifteen cents will buy a quarter-bottle of glue, enough of the sickeningly sweet smelling amber goo to last about 24 hours. The glue is addictive. It quells hunger pangs and makes Guatemala’s discarded children a little more courageous.

Glue sniffers never grow up - the addiction kills quickly, destroying massive numbers of brain and liver cells.

Carla Burnell hopes she can begin moving the first group of 70 out of the dump and onto an acreage on the outskirts of the city before the end of the year.

Although she doesn’t have a place yet in mind, nor the money to purchase the land, Burnell doesn’t worry about that - her faith has told her it will happen.

Her plan for the ministry - the one the people involved sign on to when they joined - is to provide for their needs while they learn to sustain themselves.

For many in the group like Juan Castro, the father of eight, the process has already begun.

Castro wants to run his own tire-repair business. Before he can do that, though, he knows he needs to learn everything, from how to read and write and handle money to how to keep books for his business and order supplies.

Beginning at ground zero with 80 people is a daunting task. Burnell never seems overwhelmed by the challenge.

She is confident God has a special interest in the people of the dump and already talks about what will happen next. Her worry is that man will intervene to the detriment of the people the minimal resources of the dump. There is talk the city will build an incinerator to dispose of its trash.

Although Carla hates that people live and work in the garbage, she knows without the dump there is no way for the people who exist there to continue. Although they don’t make much - about $150 per year - it is usually enough to buy a minimum of rice and beans, a diet staple.

"I’m afraid something is going to happen before we can finish our work," she said. As quickly as worry casts shadows on her face, though, it is gone, replaced by determination. "We just have to pray that they will be safe and trust God to make sure that they will."

Fulfilling A Prophecy

arla Burnell, a Hammond resident, transplanted herself to Guatemala in her search to change the lives of those who live in the dump.

Known simply as Carla to the adults, or Senora Carla to the children, Burnell has put the rest of her life in God’s hands.

Unlike the teen, who found the strength of his faith at an early age, spiritual conversion came more gradually for Burnell.

The life she leads now is one she could never have pictured five years ago. She can’t imagine living life any other way.

Although those who work with Burnell in the states and in the day-to-day ministry in Guatemala City are quick to hold her up as an ideal, Burnell deflects the praises that come her way for her work in the ministry she calls Servants Heart.

"I couldn’t do all this. God is the one who has made all of this happen. There is no way a human being could have completed all this in such a short time," Burnell said, as she relaxed in her apartment after a day spent at the dump.

"I’m just trying to do what He wants me to do," she added, as she sought for words to explain what has happened in the ministry in one year - and of the problems her faith has helped her conquer.

Supported heavily by Northwest Indiana churches, most notably her home church, St. Paul Lutheran in Munster, Burnell credits the parishioners there, the students at St. Paul School, along with other area churches and God, for helping make a difference.

In a little less than a year, she said there has been an exponential increase in the numbers whose lives have been bettered by the ministry.

The continued financial support has made it possible for a total of four teens, Sebastian and three others, to move out of the slum and into spare rooms in the apartment Burnell shares with Alice Wong.

Wong quit her job stateside after a work tour in the dump. Her goal is to work alongside Burnell to make the goal of the Servant’s Heart ministry a reality.

Bumell’s strong, expressive hands gesture skyward as she tries to explain the twisted path that led her to leave her home and family in Hammond for a mission of ministering to the people of the dump.

The seeds of the Servant’s Heart ministry were sown the first time Burnell visited the dump.
"I was with a medical team and we had loaded into the back of a pick-up truck to go to see the dump. When we got there, I jumped out and found myself ankle deep in sewage. I couldn’t believe what I saw there, how awful it was. When I looked up though, I looked out past the dump and saw a perfect double rainbow. I had never seen anything like that in my life. I have never seen anything like it since," she explained.

It was a sign of what was to come.

Likening her experience to the one detailed in the Bible where God sent a rainbow as a sign to Noah that the flood was over, Burnell said her first experience in the dump was a defining one.

"I just knew that God had a plan for me and it involved working with the people in the dump," she said.

For more than a year, Burnell spent her time away from her duties as a nurse for Hammond orthopedic surgeon Prasit Sit singing to raise money to be sent to another ministry already in place in the dump.

On vacations, she would journey to Guatemala, offering her nursing skills in a free clinic there. With the memory of the rainbow never far away, Burnell eventually quit her job in Hammond and made the leap to full-time work in a ministry in Guatemala.

She became disillusioned with that ministry and others that sought to sustain people where they lived.

Rooted in her disenchantment was the belief that God’s plan was to begin moving people out of the dump.

"People shouldn’t have to live like that, fighting with the animals for food, living in the garbage," she said. "I felt that God was telling me that I should work to try to get them out of there:’

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO HELP --

1. Most importantly, pray for the success of The Servant's Heart.

2. One time contributions are welcome.

3. For $30.00 per month, a family can be adopted.

For additional information, contact St. Paul's Lutheran Church at (219) 836-6270. All contributions are tax deductible and can be mailed to The Servant's Heart, P.O. Box 845, Hammond, Indiana, 46325. 

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