Our hotel grounds are beautiful. It’s a true oasis. It’s deceptive. We wake up to singing birds and lush green landscape. But as we board the bus…I know well what’s coming. I brace myself. It’s day two. I’m already wearing armour.
Our bus driver’s name is Alex. He is a magician. Think of all the films you’ve seen of over-crowded roads in Third World countries where there are no traffic lights and every man and machine weaving and bobbing about and then multiply that by 100. The add mounds of trash, people, rats, potholes the size of a buick…now you have Dandora. Ales squeezes our forty-foot bus through 20 foot openings. Pure death defying magic. We pour heaps of love on him as often as we can.
How to describe Dandora? It needs 3D pop-up smell-o-vision. It’s a study of opposites. Wild-eyed children up against signs that advertise Tide for brighter clothes on a building built with mud and metal scraps, landscaped with 2 to 3 feet of trash. It’s storefront after storefront advertising cafes, hotels, churches, scavenged goods and clothes for a population mostly unemployed. It’s building after building no bigger than small shacks put together with cardboard that house extended families. It’s bus after bus after minivan and minivan of people crammed in going to goodness knows where while goats eat through roadside garbage.
We arrive at Holy Cross church--the parish is literally a breath of fresh air. Walled up from the filth of outside to provide pasture-filled serenity on the inside.
Today hundreds of locals have gathered to get food from Veronica’s Place in order to be able to stomach the anti-viral medication they need to take in order to live with HIV.
A few get up to speak to us and the assembled crowd: they speak of being discriminated against and shunned by their parents, spouses, children—only here at Holy Cross and Veronica’s Place have they found peace, comfort, community and assistance. I am moved to tears by their testimonies and determination to live. It seems here laughter, tears, joy, sadness and all are mixed together and spring up to the surface in an instant. They say they are blessed to have us. I know differently. We are blessed to be God’s little helpers…filling in the gaps.
Kathryn Haydn
