A quick dump follow-up

On January 26th, we returned to the dump again to visit and see how people were doing, as well as to speak with a number of people who had medical problems. If you read the last few posts on this blog, you saw a photo that showed most of a row of homes still standing after the majority of the homes on the dump were destroyed. This is a photo of the same row of houses.

Except, they're kind of missing now, because they were destroyed when the police returned later on:




And this is the machine that does double duty as trash organiser and destroyer of homes:




The trucks keep coming, though, so many of the dump residents return and try to eke out a living despite the risks they face with the Thai police. After all, there's a reason they chose to live on a dump rather than remain in Burma.




One young boy had a wound that was infected, so we convinced his mom to let us take him (and her, of course) to a clinic to get it cleaned out properly and check that he was generally healthy (at least, as healthy as one might expect for a child who lives on a garbage dump). Note the flies in mid-air, going in for more:




After being treated at the clinic, his leg looked much better and he said it was much less painful as well.




Later that afternoon, my favourite restaurant employee told us that there was to be a partial annular solar eclipse that day so I googled it and found out what time it would occur. At the midpoint of the time range, when the moon was covering the biggest area of the sun, I took this photo. If I had been in the precisely correct part of Indonesia or the ocean, this would have shown a thin white ring around a black circle.