Garbage Trap

• Prize
• Photographer
  Rina Castelnuovo, Israel
• Date of Photograph
  online
• Website
  http://

Ad Deirat, West Bank-
From sunrise to sunset they search through the heaps of garbage, scavenging for discarded metal for recycling. For twenty Shekels per day , dozens of Palestinian kids , the youngest , nine years old, dig in the trash that flows from Jewish settlements like Kiryat Arba , Hebron, Maon, army bases, Palestinian villages. They live on the other side of the Separation Barrier, in poverty, unemployment and despair. They are sent to do the squalid work by fathers who until the outburst of the second Intifadah, earned a living working in Israel. In the early hours of the morning, in between arrivals and departures of trucks , smoke descends over the land from the burning garbage, the dump turns into the only playground for children who may have been forced to abandon their education. At times, from the trash bags, a treasure is extracted; a used costume, an umbrella, a wake up clock; for an instant they are children again. One of them, with upside down pair of white wings flitted around the dump like a butterfly.