Anna finally found the young mother and today Mary Fernandes, Tammy and Denise Burns, Kim White and I went to her home to see how we could help.  Margaret is her name and she is holding her little boy in the photo below.

To have food for the family she has to dig through the dump and people’s trash cans to collect an enormous bag of dirty, plastic bottles every day and bring them to a processing plant, which sounds and looks like Dante’s Inferno! For the bag she receives 250 shillings or about .10 cents a bag!

We were shocked at the continual, horrifically grating, shrill of the grinding machine and appalled that women sit there all-day dumping dirt and other unmentionables out of the plastic bottles before sending them through to the “screeching demon ” bottle crusher.  It was simply horrifying and these women do this from sunup to sundown six days a week.  We never saw Margaret smile.

She and her baby live with grandma in a room with one bed. They were unsure of why we were there since they h ad not asked for us to come.  The other women at the dump had asked if there was a way to help this young mother and so we came. 

Margaret is somewhat mentally handicapped although she made it through 7^th grade and I thought she looked more shell shocked than handicap. She never smiled while we sat and talked in their small one room home.  Grandma did all the talking while Margaret and the baby both licked a lollypop Tammy Burns had brought. I must tell you I have not been able to get the image of her eyes out of my head.

Margaret and her husband had lived in Tanga on the coast and after the baby was born, he beat her and kicked her out of the house, so she came home with her child to grandma in Arusha.  

Her little boy was sweet with eyes too big for his face, thin arms, big head and small body, a sure sign of malnutrition. He loved the lollypop, probably his first. His mother’s eyes were lifeless even with a lollypop.