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Home  / News & Publications /  Michigan Catholic News / 2008 /  'Hell' on Earth

by Joe Kohn of The Michigan Catholic
Published August 29, 2008

Photo courtesy of Central American Ministries Two children pick through garbage in a dump in Honduras. Central American Ministries, based in Ann Arbor, is helping improve the lives of thousands of children who, like these, live in garbage dumps in Central America.

Ann Arbor — Walking through a historic house in Ann Arbor, Jesuit Fr. Don Vettise jokes about local community members scowling at him for tearing down a rickety "historic" garage at the back of the property.

If they'd been where he's been, they might chuckle about it, too.

The house, on South Ashley Street near the University of Michigan Campus, serves as headquarters for Central American Ministries, which Fr. Vettise founded in 1995 to help people living in some of the poorest, dirtiest, most dangerous places on Earth — garbage dumps. The nonprofit, which started in 1995 and moved to Ann Arbor in 2006, is helping rescue thousands from rat bites, maggot infestations, malnutrition, and fires in El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti and Honduras.

Joe Kohn | The Michigan Catholic Fr. Don Vettise, SJ, chats at CAM headquarters.

"It's hell," Fr. Vettise says of the conditions in the dumps, where many poor families make their homes and try to earn money for food by gleaning recyclable materials from mountains of trash. "It's a horrible thing to see — but it's a beautiful thing to see them coming out of it."

He pops a promotional DVD into a player in the house's living room. The TV screen shows scenes of people living in a hot and hazy-aired squalor, where it's obvious they were never meant to be.

Life in the dump

Photo courtesy of Central American Ministries A boy holds two trash bags as residents of a dump in Guatemala City sift through a fresh load of garbage. Central American Ministries is helping improve the lives of thousands living in garbage dumps in Central American cities.

Rosita Ventura is 15. Two months ago, she lost both of her parents and her two older brothers in an avalanche of garbage in a Guatemala dump.

"It was a family with 10 children. They were scavenging," says Oscar Dussán, executive director of Central American Ministries. "There are 49 families in the same situation."

Today, Rosita is doing her best to raise her seven younger siblings.

Three times since June 20 have avalanches of garbage buried and killed residents of the dump near Guatemala City. Dussán and Fr. Vettise have traveled three times to Guatemala this summer, asking the city's mayor for resources to help.

Garbage avalanches aren't all that can happen.

Children are crushed by bulldozers.

Simple cuts, untreated, turn into life-threatening infections.

Insects, vultures and rats bite, spreading disease.

Pockets of gas burst into flames, spreading deadly fumes.

These are the things that thousands in developing countries worry about each day.

"These are the poorest people," Fr. Vettise says. "And these are the unwashed of those poor. If you see a 49-year-old, they will look to you as if they're 79."

Jesuit Fr. Don Vettise with a resident of a dump in Honduras.

When Fr. Vettise first encountered the situation in 1992, he said he didn't know where to start. So, with the blessings of the Jesuit order, he started everywhere. Today, Central American Ministries' many-pronged approach to alleviate this dramatic poverty focuses on housing, nutrition, schools, adult education, service trips for lay and medical volunteers, and even giving micro-loans to those in the dumps.

CAM's base in Ann Arbor allows the ministry to garner volunteers who are college-aged, or who have medical expertise. It also keeps the ministry anchored in the First World, where people have financial resources to help.

In all, the ministry has an annual budget of about $1.5 million; only 7 percent goes toward administrative costs. With its local staff of six, plus five in Central America, the ministry works with the governments of the Central American countries to procure grants, build schools, nurseries, housing and medical facilities. The buildings and supplies are nothing as fancy as those in the United States — but they're huge improvements over makeshift huts sitting on mounds of garbage.

Ordained at Gesu Parish in Detroit in June of 1982, Fr. Vettise didn't know his priestly ministry would focus on the poorest of people in remote parts of the world. For the most part, he ministered in education, first as a layperson in the 1970s, then as a priest.

In 1992, he was president of St. John Jesuit High School in Toledo — a post he retained until 2006 — and was leading students on a mission trip to Guatemala. It was only because a road was closed that they were diverted to a dump, where they found the poor's poor.

We need them

Residents of a dump in Honduras attend a groundbreaking for a Central American Ministries nursery.

Since, Fr. Vettise has recruited many from the local area to help with the ministry. As he's quick to remind Christians in the first world, they need the poor more than the poor need them.

Barb Tuohey knows. A parishioner of SS. Peter & Paul Parish in Detroit, she traveled with CAM to a dump in Guatemala City as part of a mission trip last year with her son, a graduate of University of Detroit Jesuit High School.

"It changed our lives," Touhey said. "The total poverty. I just could not imagine people living there."

Touhey and her son, Jay, volunteered in a medical clinic. Though she's not one to shy away from spending time outdoors, she said the conditions in the garbage dump gave "rouging it" a new meaning. "I'm not afraid of a lot of things — but this was completely beyond my comprehension of what people should have to deal with," she said. "There is no human being who should have to live like an animal." After just a couple of weeks in the dump, when she got back she had a hard time coming to grips with all the blessings she had back in suburban Detroit.

"I could not reckon the size of my backyard for several weeks," she said.

Her friend and fellow missionary, Dr. Nancy Franz, had just been starting a pediatric clinic at the time of their mission trip.

While she, too, was overwhelmed by the desperate conditions of the people, she noticed something seemingly bigger than the dumps themselves — the hearts of the mothers she met there.

Given the setting, she said the mothers cared for their children and kept them impressively clean and healthy.

"Some of the kids were better cared for than here in the United States," said Dr. Frantz, a parishioner at St. Anastasia Parish in Troy. "That's how much their mothers loved them and cared for them. They were as clean as they could be. And, yeah, their teeth were rotted — but they were doing the best they could."

Beyond Central America

One question Frantz had been asked a lot about her trip was why she ever made it — after all, there are plenty of people in the United States who need help, too.

"It's different," she explains, "People in the United States have some sort of help. There are social services here in the United States and they can help these people get going with programs, especially for the kids. These people (in the dumps) don't have anything. Nothing."

It's this crux of the ministry — the fact that it seeks the absolute poorest — that is now extending CAM's focus to beyond just Central America.

This year, the ministry also is testing the feasibility of expanding to dumps in Cairo, Nicaragua, Manila, Panama, the Philippines and Sierra Leone.

Already, CAM's progress is matter of record. It's built 250 homes, runs schools serving 1,200 students, operates nurseries in Guatemala and El Salvador, sponsors nutritional and emergency food programs in Honduras, and runs a micro-business loan program and sewing school for adults in Guatemala.

An independent study by the Instituto Universitario de Opinion Publica in El Salvador even measured its results objectively and showed that CAM's mission was being accomplished.

That's all the more reason Fr. Vettise says the mission should be expanded.

As he's fond of saying: "If not now, when? If not us, who?"

Plus, he adds, the gratification people get out of helping the poor is contagious.

"There's a ripple effect," he says. "I don't know of anyone who hasn't been moved to do something." In a historic house near downtown Ann Arbor, it might be hard to visualize the reality of garbage dump dwellers in impoverished countries. But Christ's own words bring their plight close to the hearts of local Christians.

Just turn to St. Luke's Gospel, Fr. Vettise says.

"'Who is your neighbor?' is the question," he says. "The answer to that question is everyone in need."