Childhood

Childhood, for most this time in your life is filled with happy giggles as you toddle around the house playing with all your toys. For the children growing up in the Municipal dump of Jinotega, childhood is a very different period of time. Here even the cleanest of spring water still has high levels of naturally occurring arsenic, let alone the contaminated water available to those living in the trash community. Obvious lesions on the skin along with bloating the of intestines meant the children here were fighting both arsenic poisoning and malnutrition. Fortunately the water filters being deployed were capable of filtering all bacteria, contagions and arsenic from the water, but the damage had already been done. In an almost eerie fashion, none of the children we met laughed or smiled despite all of our best efforts, it wasn't until we were about ready to leave that finally one of our volunteers was finally able to tease a smile out of a little girl. It was as the little girl was smiling that the parents faces lit up and they thanked us profusely for the simple act of getting their daughter to smile.