Somehow, in a place filled with things that others have deemed undesirable, there was dancing and singing. More than 400 people (including 80 UVA students) had come to the city dump of Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, on March 5. The event—El Dia de Luz, The Day of Light—was organized by Brad Corrigan of the now-extinct jam band Dispatch and culminated in a Corrigan-led concert.
Eighty UVA students spent their spring break in Nicaragua working with orphans. One highlight of the trip? A concert at the city dump.
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The UVA students had traveled to Nicaragua on an annual spring break trip organized by a campus group, the Nicaraguan Orphan Fund (NOF). Beyond the time in the city dump, the NOF partnered with three orphanages on the outskirts of Managua to provide students with an opportunity to serve in, and experience the culture of, Nicaragua. Students spent time with orphans in a number of different settings throughout the week, including a church service, a trip to the movies and an afternoon at a water park.
At the dump, they saw an astonishing mix of the familiar and the foreign: Coca-Cola bottles, Colgate toothpaste boxes, Daffy Duck bed sheets and Chevy truck advertisements all dotting the smoking landscape. While a cool breeze blew off Lake Managua, crows circled above as cows grazed among flaming and charred mounds of trash. Over 1,000 people live and work in the dump, sifting and searching among the trash for items with any value.
As the concert wrapped up, Corrigan declared into the microphone in Spanish, “The message today is family. We are all family here today.”
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