Hanley Denning, 36; to Guatemalans, she was 'angel of the dump'

In Guatemala City, where the hair of child scavengers in the city dump turns rust-colored from methane gas, Hanley Graham Denning was known as a saint.

The blond, blue-eyed, soft-spoken young woman from Maine, who had worked with children suffering from AIDS in Roxbury, visited Guatemala in 1997 to learn Spanish so she could better communicate with her young charges. She decided to stay.

On Jan.18, as Ms. Denning was traveling to her home in nearby Antigua, her car was hit by a bus and she and her driver were killed. She was 36.

She won't easily be forgotten. A short documentary, "Recycled Life," about the Guatemalans living in the dump and featuring Ms. Denning -- "El angel del Basurero," or "the Angel of the Garbage Dump" -- has been nominated for an Academy Award.

Ms. Denning first saw the dump when a nun and a priest took her to the sprawling 35-acre pit, dug into a ravine. Hundreds of children and women, some with babies on their backs, were searching through the rubble. Many start the day there at 4 a.m.

Horrified, she decided she had to do something. In 1999 she founded the non profit Safe Passage program, set up a school in a small abandoned church at the dump, and ministered to the poor.

During the 1995-96 academic year that Ms. Denning worked on a master's degree at Wheelock College in Boston, her field placement was with The Foundation for Children with AIDS in Roxbury, now defunct. She earned her degree in early childhood education.

"Hanley believed in living your passion and finding a way to do what you believe in, and she was following hers in Guatemala," said Wheelock president Jackie Jenkins-Scott, who invited Ms. Denning to the college's international scholars gathering in October. "When she started her program there, these kids were not schooled at all. At first, the school was broken into during the night, but then when people saw what Hanley was doing, they prevented that."

Ms. Denning played a major role in raising funds for the construction of a school on the edge of the dump. The school now accommodates 500 children, Jenkins-Scott said.

Ms. Denning inspired many from this and other countries, including Wheelock students who have gone to Guatemala to volunteer with Safe Passage.

Heather Viger, 21, of Lynn, a senior in early childhood education at Wheelock, spent more than a week there in March 2005.

"You can never prepare yourself emotionally for what you see at the dump," she said. "Children and people in rags and with no shoes, dirt on their faces, and lice in their hair. A lot of them have a rusty color in their hair from exposure to the methane gas in the dump.

"Hanley's presence there was often compared to an angel's," Viger said. "Her soft-spokenness didn't match her capabilities. No matter how many children she was taking care of, she wanted more and more. . . . She was amazing. She is the exact replica of what I want to be someday. . . . Now, I feel a responsibility to go back there. I'm not going to let her mission fail."

From Safe Passage's office in Yarmouth, Maine, Rachel Meyn, who worked closely with Ms. Denning for six years in Guatemala, recalled that she met Ms. Denning when she first went there to photograph the children.

Meyn said that Ms. Denning felt compelled to help the people after an early visit to the dump, where she saw a baby in a cardboard box, his arms hanging out, waiting while his mother picked through the garbage.

"Hanley couldn't sleep for several days after that," Meyn said. "She called home and told her parents to sell her computer and car and started out with $2,000 and scrubbing the church floors with the priest."

In the beginning, Meyn said, 19 children enrolled in the school. The number doubled in the first year. "One of Ms. Denning's first goals," Meyn said, "was to help the children get their childhood back. When you looked into their eyes, they looked 20 years older than us."

At Safe Passage, children not only learn to read and write but also get vocational training, including carpentry and baking, and undergo an apprenticeship "to help them become employable," Meyn said. The staff includes Guatemalan teachers and volunteers, as well as social workers and healthcare workers.

Many of the poor live in shacks ringing the edges of the ravine, in an area blighted by raw sewage.

Despite the efforts of Ms. Denning and her volunteers, up to 1,500 poor people still labor in the dump, hunting for food and recyclables, according to Ellie Friedland, a Wheelock faculty member who has been visiting Guatemala for 11 years in connection with a literacy project.

"Hundreds of thousands of vultures fly over it," she said. "Fires are very common and toxic materials ooze" in the dump.

A native of Yarmouth, Maine, Ms. Denning graduated from Bowdoin College in 1992. For a time in Maine, she was an outreach worker for children with the Brunswick mental health center.

In 2002, Bowdoin College presented Ms. Denning with its Common Good Award for having "dedicated her life to helping the children of the world, particularly those suffering from the ravages of disease and poverty."

Ms. Denning was always concerned for younger people, said her father, Michael of Yarmouth. She was always looking over her younger siblings, he said.

"She was a wonderful, wonderful woman, my little girl," he said.

To Friedland, Ms. Denning was "a visionary."

"You saw that as soon as you met her," she said. "She was amazingly happy."

In addition to her father, Ms. Denning leaves her mother, Marina of Yarmouth, Maine; and three brothers, Seth of Washington, D.C., Jordan of New York City, and Lucas of Yarmouth, Maine.

Services have been held in Guatemala, in Maine, and at Wheelock College in Boston.

For more information on the school in Guatemala, go to www.safepassage.org. For information on the Oscar- nominated documentary, go to www.recycledlifedoc.com.