PROVO — The smell of a gargantuan garbage dump in San Salvador is so repulsive that it would keep most people far away.
Unfortunately, many El Salvadorans aren't like most people because they have no money, no jobs and no choice but to spend their days at landfills, sorting through other people's trash in search of treasure.
In their world, a good day of digging would yield plastic, wood — or food.
More than 100 children, many orphans, work and live at one dump in the country's capital. They are silent while they scavenge for recyclable products like paper, a pound of which can be redeemed for 70 centavos, roughly 8 cents in U.S. currency. Their feet are cracked and dirty from working day after day at a dump.
They would wear shoes, but they don't have any.
Their parents work nearby. Some are single moms with many mouths to feed. Others haven't had decent employment since a series of devastating earthquakes hit in 2001.
All are "pepenadores" — or sifters — and their plight is being chronicled by Brigham Young University graduate Brooks Dame.
"They're out here digging through the trash to survive," Dame said. "They have no choice but to go to the dumps."
Dame fell in love with the tiny country, called "el pulgarcito," or "little thumb," of Central America because of its small stature, while serving an LDS mission there from 1998 to 2000.
He saw the lingering damage of a 12-year civil war that pitted brother against brother, leaving 75,000 dead and those remaining poor.
The poverty shocked the Oregon native, who hadn't witnessed such destitution in his life. He pledged to do something about it and visited each summer thereafter with a Utah humanitarian organization. On one such trip, he met his future wife, a Utahn visiting extended family in her mother's native country.
Together, they decided to film a documentary about los pepenadores.
"The first time I went there years ago, I had no idea that people were really living there," Kristi Dame said.
"With this Hacking case, everybody is talking about how bad the landfill smells, but these people in El Salvador actually live there."
His task wasn't easy. It took time to get permission to film the dumps. He had no experience as a filmmaker. And what he saw devastated him.
One day just after Dame had eaten at Pollo Campero — Central America's equivalent of KFC — he noticed a 5-year-old scavenging in the dump.
Suddenly, the child screamed out, "Pollo Campero!" and happily began eating some leftover chicken. The juxtaposition of his $4 meal at a restaurant and the child's feast in a dump saddened Dame.
"As a filmmaker, capturing that kind of stuff was awesome," Dame said. "But on the personal side, it just rips your heart out because this is their life."
And while nothing miraculous took place during the two weeks Dame spent in El Salvador last month, he managed to document a significant change.
Slowly, with Dame's encouragement, the workers decided to form a union and stand up for their rights. They joined with a nonprofit organization called Help the Children and petitioned their boss for a soccer field.
"I don't feel like it was anything I did," Dame said. "I just think it was the human spirit. I think they just gained confidence."
Los pepenadores aren't exclusive to El Salvador. There are people salvaging garbage for a living all over the world — in Mexico, in Chile, even South Africa.
"These children basically live in the dump," said Katie Walther, who recently took a group of Utah teens down to Guatemala to work with Safe Passage, an organization dedicated to educating children pepenadores.
"They're trying to educate them so that they can have a brighter future."
Dame hopes that his documentary, expected to be completed by the end of the year, will raise awareness of the extreme poverty in El Salvador and other Third World countries.
More important, however, he hopes to raise money for los pepenadores.
It's the children he's worried about the most. They told Dame that they want to grow up to be policemen, doctors or engineers. Not one said they wanted to be a pepenador.
"Will they get out of the dump?" he asks. "I don't know. But at least they still have their dreams."
E-mail: lwarner@desnews.com