Author’s note:

I had expected to write this column about the Maine economy. However, Hanley Denning, the young woman from Yarmouth, Maine who died tragically last week in a car accident in Guatemala, touched my life and many others in a special way. I am writing this column as a tribute to her work.

Hanley graduated from Bowdoin College in 1992 and had embarked on a teaching career in rural North Carolina when a trip to Guatemala in 1999 to study Spanish incidentally exposed her to the children of the Guatemala City dump. It turned out to be a transforming experience for her and, most fortunately, for the children of the dump.

If you haven’t seen the Guatemala City dump, it is difficult to imagine the squalor. The dump is enormous, set in a deep ravine that stretches away on a horizon of burning ash and vultures. The vultures are everywhere, circling above endlessly and landing in such close proximity to people that, when I first saw them, I was frightened they were coming for me.

It was the summer of 2005 and my wife, Sally, and I were co-leaders of a group of adults and teens from our church in Cumberland who had come to volunteer at Camino Seguro, or Safe Passage as Hanley had named her program,. Safe Passage provides schooling to the children working at the dump.

The dump is a hub of economic activity for the native families who have come from the countryside to settle in a squalid shanty town surrounding the dump. All  family members help in the scavenging from which they eek out a living. Viewing the dump from an overlook that Hanley had access to, I was struck by the fact that close inspection through the smoke and haze revealed a small community of people scurrying among the debris like so many ants. Just in the middle of all the activity, perched on a mound of debris, was a bright “Orange Crush” sign denoting a small store that sold soft drinks and snacks. It was a vision of Hell illuminated by that bright orange sign.

This is not the place one would expect to find a young American woman putting all her heart and soul into making a future for these children. Hanley came to this place on a visit to learn Spanish. She was so moved by the children’s plight that she told her parents to sell her car and computer, using the proceeds to set up a one-room school in an abandoned church across the road from the dump.

What was so special about Hanley was not simply her caring. She had a remarkable ability to come up with innovative solutions that she cobbled together as she went along. She quickly learned that her ability to reach the hundreds of children working in the dump was limited by the fact that their parents needed them to help scavenge. To address this problem she devised a payment system in the form of a monthly food “allowance” to all families who enrolled their children in her program. The family received the allowance each month so long as their children missed no more than 3 days of school that month.

Almost immediately, this idea led to a surge in attendance that stretched the capacity of her one room operation. Hanley then convinced the city government to let her use a series of dilapidated buildings across from the entrance to the dump to form a proper school and she began to recruit Guatemalan teachers to join with volunteers to develop a full-fledged program.

Of course to pull all this off, she needed funding, so she turned to her Maine network of friends, schools, churches, and community groups to provide financial support. She came up with the idea of personal sponsorship (a donation of $720 supports one child in the program for an entire school year) which also forms a continuing bond between the sponsor and student.

As the program continued to grow, Hanley saw the need for health services for the children and their families. Somehow she convinced an outside health group to set up a clinic by the school. She also added social workers to help her identify potential students and work with families, mostly mothers, in the program. She instituted a monthly meeting day when the mothers brought all of their children to the school for progress meetings and counseling. These monthly meetings became a high point in the lives of the mothers who were both able to see their child could receive an education, that they mattered to someone, and that they could also earn their monthly supplemental food supplies.

Today Safe Passage is serving close to 600 children. Hanley has transformed the nature of opportunity for these children of Guatemala and built a program with the capacity to carry on, as painful as her loss will be.  She had remakable gifts and an enormous capacity for sharing.  Thank you, Hanley. We will miss you.