Free Betrayed by Jeanette Windle Page A

the moment they were working their way through the Creation Story, and as Vicki had placed the colorful images of animals and plants and flowers on a flannel board, she wondered if these children had any concept that such a world even existed beyond the surreal landscape they woke up to each morning.
     
    This is my Father’s world.
     
    Vicki’s mouth twisted wryly. Not for these kids at least. Still, what would be the possibilities of some field trips? Maybe even a campout? That would be something to bring up with Evelyn before she left.
     
    It was the vultures that detoured Vicki’s steps before she reached the thatched schoolroom. She paused to check that her students were still bent over their assignment, then quickly crossed the scuffed earth of the courtyard.
     
    This project compound had been built right on the edge of the ravine that served as a municipal dump, offering an unrestricted vista of the landscape that greeted Vicki’s students every day—a wasteland of refuse as far as the eye could see.
     
    Ignoring the streaks mud brick left on her T-shirt, Vicki leaned out over the low adobe wall. Tears burned her eyes as a sudden updraft caught her nostrils.
     
    That stench was a combination of rotting garbage and fumes from the fires, some set purposely to diminish the trash hills, others the spontaneous combustion of methane gas generated by tons of decomposing compost. There’d been a time when Vicki had found it inconceivable that human beings spent their days toiling down in that reeking inferno, much less lived there.
     
    Vicki could see cardboard and scrap wood shacks climbing the slopes of the ravine. Permanent paths wound through unsalvageable garbage and rusted car frames to the dirt tracks where rusting yellow trucks dumped fifteen hundred tons of trash each day. Riches to be fought over with the vultures and scrawny mongrels—and each other. Rakes hammered from foraged metal pulled apart fresh loads as fast they could be shoveled. Deft fingers shook off vegetable peelings to pick out glass, plastic, cardboard, cans, rags—anything that could be sold to the recycling merchants keeping a prudent distance beyond the top of the ravine.
     
    Children were there too, those not fortunate enough to be squirming on the benches behind Vicki. Babies tied to their mothers’ bent backs or tucked for safety into an old tire or box. Older children picked through their parents’ rakings. Just down the slope from where Vicki stood, two boys struggled to roll an old tire up a muddy path. Farther down, a toddler screamed as a stray dog snatched away the half-eaten melon she’d unearthed.
     
    Filthy, their scavenged garments tattered, rags binding hands and feet against the constant cuts and scrapes, hair matted and strawlike from malnutrition, these waifs were distinguished from the debris through which they foraged only by their movements.
     
    But it was the vultures that drew Vicki’s intent gaze. They were always out there by the thousands, wheeling lazily above the mountains of garbage or perched hunch-shouldered on the smoking heaps.
     
     These vultures were different. Their tight pattern circled above a single, distant mound, dropping lower and lower.  Spooked by some movement, they scattered upward. Only to begin their slow circling again.
     
    Vicki had seen that patient waiting game before. There was fresh meat out there.
     
    And it was still alive.
     
    Brushing back a wisp of hair the breeze had tugged from her ponytail, Vicki leaned precariously farther, blinking away the burning in her eyes. Had that blur of black beneath the circling carrion birds just moved? 
     
    Then, in one of those glimpses of clarity where tears themselves act as a magnifying lens, the blur coalesced into focus. Black plastic. One of the industrial trash bags in which wealthier Guatemalans disposed of their waste.
     
    And, yes, a definite movement had just sent the vultures fluttering upward again. Had one of the