Photo from Timothy’s website http://www.timothybouldry.com/s13apfri0efh0xipqqaj8kxvyfe7co
25 kids, who grew up playing and working in La Chureca dumpsite in Managua, Nicaragua’s capital, have started school due to the ISWA’s Scholarship Program. Timothy Bouldry, ISWA’s partner who administrates and supervises the program, in a recent Instagram post, mentions “Love, gratitude and inspiration radiated from the ISWA Kids today as we talked about grades, conduct, rewards and the future! Every child has a sponsor now which makes everything flow for us with more ease and we all know there is someone out there who thinks about us and is routing for us to succeed! For that, a huge hug, thousands of miles long, extends to all the sponsors (aka: padrinos) and people who donated to make this possible for us!”. Timothy is originally a photographer from New York. For the last two years he has been living in Nicaragua, close to the above mentioned dumpsites. He has been photographing and reporting about unregulated waste sites from the informal recycler’s perspective for 8 years.
ISWA established the Scholarship Program in 2015 as an effort to highlight the need to stop children working and playing inside active, filthy dumpsites and demonstrate the need for closing the world’s biggest dumpsites. ISWA would like to do something about this by preparing and educating next generation youths who would otherwise follow their parent’s footsteps into the informal trash business. Zoe Lenkiewicz has written a great post describing the need and the complexities of closing dumpsites and creating alternatives for the people that depend on them.
You can see a video with some of the kids that participate the program here and here. ISWA’s Scholarship Program is an important step towards a global campaign for closing the world’s biggest dumpsites.ISWA will present a “Roadmap for Closing the Dumpsites” in its 2016 conference, September 19-21 in Novisad, Serbia .
