Destroying Computers

The whole time I've been working at the comedor, I've seen a bunch of computer parts - monitors, CPUs, & keyboards - piled on top of a cabinet. I wondered why they were there and if there was a plan for them. Wednesday, Raúl took them all down from the cabinet and stacked them by the door. Yesterday, Beto let the kids take the monitors to a scrap place to sell and let them keep the money. This afternoon, the kids took the CPUs outside and tore them apart to pull the cables out. One of the boys took all the cables home to strip the copper wires out to sell. Beto said that you can sell copper for a lot here. I helped the kids finish pulling the cables out of the CPUs - it was fun tearing apart the computers, although I think the kids enjoyed it far more than me - and load the ripped apart computers on the cart to take to the scrap guy.

One of the boys asked if I was going with them to sell the scraps. I've never been out in the neighborhood around the comedor other than riding to and from work. I told the boy I'd like to go, as long as Beto was ok with it. Beto said it was ok and told the kids to look out for me. I was really excited to be able to go walking around with the kids on their turf. We walked the 5 blocks to a garage with huge sacks full of scraps that this man buys from people. He loads the scraps onto a truck and takes them elsewhere. On the way back to the comedor, we stopped at a kiosko (kind of like a tiny convenient store - some are self-service and some are a window where you tell the clerk what you want) for the kids to buy a soda with the money they made from the computer scraps.

This has been the highlight of my week so far. It felt as though another barrier had been broken down between me and the community in which I work.