No, I wasn't thrown on another planet.
In fact, I'm on Earth as Earth as it gets.
I'm in the mouth of your stomach and I'm coming up with your vomit.
Everything here is vomit, a hundred thousand square meters of society's vomit.
Everything except human beings, who collect our indifference, greed, greed.
The Dandora landfill is the largest in Africa and in the midst of these valleys of garbage live six thousand people.
On either side of it, tens of thousands more survive thanks to the garbage.
We walk for hours in a landscape that cannot be defined as unreal, because here you find everything you have used and thrown away in your life, plus that of the people you have known and loved.
We are all here, in the hills of Dandora.
In front of those who feed on our vomit, toil and get sick.
Human beings who if you try to say "poor things" spit at your feet and go back to work.
Who work hard to choose, separate, sell and keep for themselves what they find.
Sacks and sacks of vomit.
For years, while the world of solidarity and indignation has failed to do much for their dignity. The institutions...we don't talk about them.
Many have even taken advantage of it and continue to do so.
It's not easy to understand, it was necessary to be here, between bile and gags. Breathing impossible miasmas, not being able to distinguish the tears of desolation from those of toxic fumes.
Talking to them, to those who were born and have lived here, who have done this as a profession and who have now founded (thanks to the Comboni Fathers) an organization that thinks about their present and their future.
Because it seems absurd to say, but they, the "waste pickers", have more hope, more future and more desire to make it than we do.
I think I'll have a lot to write about this place and the cruel reality of workers in all respects that in addition to doing a shitty job and to the fury of being told "poor", "last", "outcasts", are underpaid by the chain that starts from the vultures who buy what they collect every day, and that arrives to those who make themselves beautiful with the objects of recycling and maybe sell them by the pound, have no health coverage and no other help from those who continue undaunted to vomit.
Over the next few weeks I'll be telling you about Solomon, Didi, Caroline and the others. Who have the misfortune of being born in this era, on our own planet.