"Angel of the Garbage Dump" Reading at Brookline Booksmith

Maine-native Hanley Denning saw poverty and desperation in its ugliest form, and refused to turn a blind eye. A former track star at Bowdoin College, Denning was struck by what she saw at the Guatemalan City dump: garbage pickers competing with vultures for the food dumped by trucks, toddlers playing amidst rats. The experience prompted her to, as Mother Teresa said, “find her own Calcutta.” Hanley called her family in New England and asked them to sell everything she owned and wire her the money. Then, she launched an educational reinforcement nonprofit called Safe Passage, or “Camino Seguro,” and helped pull thousands of children out of one of the largest urban landfills in the Americas. Denning was killed in a car accident outside the Guatemalan capital in 2007, but Safe Passage continues to change countless lives today.

Join author Jacob Wheeler for a reading at Brookline Booksmith from his book “Angel of the Garbage Dump: How Hanley Denning Changed the World, One Child at a Time” — the story of a woman from Maine who launched a school in the Guatemala City dump.