Date: December 8th 2008

The following fictional story is written by Adel Torres and is based on what she saw in the slum last week. These are her photos. She has a blog at www.thisjourneymyhome.blogspot.com.

My name is Laxmi. I am 7 years old. I live at Dharampur in Amritsar, Punjab, India, beside a dumping ground. Next to my house is a pile of garbage sacks, each one almost as big as my house. Every day my mother and father sort through the sacks, separating plastics and paper and other recyclables. Like today, mother is sitting on the ground in front of the house with piles of papers and bottles while baby crawls around among it all. Here in our neighborhood babies like her don’t wear pants. They would only be soiled anyway.

Grandpa sleeps in the house in front of ours. He is too old now to sort trash. His eyes are milky-blue with blindness, and he cannot walk well because his legs are very thin and wasted. He eats rice from our pot. Every day he sits on a stool in front of his house in the sunshine.

I sleep on a wooden bed with my family. The walls of our house are made from sticks and the sacks and plastic that come from the garbage. Our neighborhood is right on the edge of the street. When you come in from the street, you have to pass the piles of garbage by my uncle’s house. The garbage collects thousands of flies that crawl around on the ground, the walls, and the babies faces. The flies like the buffalo feces that we collect for making firewood. We don’t have a buffalo, but the people in the big brick house at the end of the lot do.

Sometimes we find other nice things. One time mother found a doll for me with long yellow hair that went straight up and huge blue eyes. Someone must have thrown the doll away because part of her face was broken off. But her eyes are so pretty, and now I can play mama, too.

I don’t go to school. All the money we get from the recyclables goes to buy food and pay the 250 rupee rent (about $5). There isn’t any more left for school fees and books, much less for uniforms, and it would be a disgrace to go to school in my own dirty rags. So while other children are in school, I help mother sort the garbage or play with my friends in the garbage field. We find toys sometimes. Today my little brothers made kites from plastic and they are running around trying to make them fly.

Dogs, buffalo, and horses sometimes come to eat from the trash.

I hope there will be rice and dal for lunch today. When we have food, mother cooks it in an old tin kettle on the clay stove. When she cooks, the water runs down in a little black stream through the pathway between the houses. It is a good place to throw bits of garbage.

The man who owns the garbage field says he wants to clean it up. If they take away all the garbage, I don’t know where we will get the plastics and papers and other recyclables to buy food. Maybe we will have to move to another garbage place.

I wish I could go to school and wear a nice bright uniform, but I suppose I will sort trash like my mother when I grow up. If I grow up. I'm getting old enough now I have a pretty good chance, but lots of children die here. If I grow up then I can have a husband and a baby, too. I will work hard so my baby can have rice every day and mother can sit on a bench in the sunshine. Maybe I can find a doll for my baby. Someday, when I grow up and sort garbage.

(Note: we would like to open a small school near Laxmi's home. This will take some research and exploration so we don't know the total cost of running a school like this in the North of India. But if you would like to help Laxmi and her friends go to school, please click the "Invest" button below to sponsor this an our other schools in similar conditions).

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