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Rina Castelnuovo

The New York Times

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 is nine years old, dig in the trash that flows from Jewish settlements like Kiryat Arba, Hebron, Maon, as well as from army bases and Palestinian villages. They live on the other side of the Separation Barrier in economic distress, unemployment and despair. They are sent to do the horrible 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 the children, that the majority of them waive education. At times, from the trash bags, a treasure is extracted; a used Purim costume, an umbrella, an alarm clock. For an instant they are children again. One of them, with white pair of wings on his back, lingers at the dump, like a butterfly.

Summer 2007

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