Sigue Adelante! Guatemalan non-profit Safe Passage moves forward, in Hanley’s spirit

Glen Arbor Sun

Safe Passage, one of the most successful non-profits in Central America and the guiding light of hope for families living and scavenging for food on the periphery of Guatemala City’s enormous garbage dump, is alive and well despite the death of its founder Hanley Denning in a car accident last January. The Great Lakes Friends of Safe Passage, the local branch of the organization known throughout Guatemala as Camino Seguro, will hold their third annual Fiesta fundraiser on Tuesday, July 17 from 5:30-8 p.m. at the Hagerty Center in Traverse City.


This year’s event, a “Journey to Guatemala,” will feature a “virtual visit” to Safe Passage, live music, food and drink, silent and live auctions of Guatemalan arts and crafts, as well as a short film tribute to Hanley by Leslie Iwerks, whose documentary “Recycled Life” about families in the garbage dump was nominated for an Academy Award. The auction will include art made by the children of Safe Passage, and guests can also buy an “Angel of Hope” like the one Hanley carried on her keychain.

In the wake of Hanley’s passing, northern Michigan locals are playing increasingly important roles in the brain trust of Safe Passage, which now helps almost 600 local children leave the dump’s squalid conditions and pursue an education unimaginable to most in Guatemala’s impoverished, desperate capital. Half a dozen Safe Passage children were recently accepted into some of Guatemala’s most competitive private schools; and Safe Passage was recognized and visited this spring by both U.S. First Lady Laura Bush and Guatemalan First Lady Wendy Berger.

Sharon Workman, of Cedar, was recently named Chair of the Board of Directors at Safe Passage, replacing outgoing Chairman Paul Sutherland of the Traverse City-based Financial Investment Management Group, who started our area’s relationship with Camino Seguro when he met Hanley on an airplane — an event that changed his life. “Like most people who met Hanley, I was so moved by her dedication to these children, and by the difference Safe Passage was making in their lives, I knew I had to stay involved,” says Workman. In the past two years, over 40 area residents have traveled to Guatemala as volunteers on service-learning trips. And Northwestern Michigan College (NMC) just announced a new educational partnership with the organization. Professor Mary Pierce, who returned from a visit to Safe Passage in late June, explains, “It is our hope that we would send students and interested staff and faculty, on a rotating basis, to do volunteer work. It would be an invaluable opportunity for the College to provide this rich and rewarding learning experience for our students.”

Maggie Cassem (who has 10-year-old twins adopted from Guatemala) and her 17-year-old daughter Kaitlynn of Cedar — a future doctor who performed dental hygiene work with the children —were among the locals who embarked on a service-learning trip in February, just three weeks after Hanley’s passing. “I thought I had seen poverty from being down there before to adopt,” says Maggie. “I thought I was somewhat prepared for it. But I just cried when I saw [the people competing with the vultures in the dump for food]. It’s unbelievable what they have to go through to put a meal on the table.”

What struck Wendy Martin, a retired Glen Lake schoolteacher who also visited in February, was the contrast between the dump and its desperation, and the program and the hope it fosters. “You snap a photo of the dump and then turn around and here is this program that offers so much hope, so much faith in the future. [The prevailing mood was not about Hanley’s] death or about how the dump is taking over the city and all human life around it. The new children’s guarderia [daycare] is immaculate. You could eat off the floor in that place, and the kids there are singing, smiling and reading. The overwhelming feeling was one of hope and possibilities.”

Hanley Denning, a native of Yarmouth, Maine and graduate of Bowdoin College, founded Safe Passage in 1999 when she sold her car and computer and returned to Guatemala City to fund a drop-in center for tutoring and shelter. The organization quickly grew into a comprehensive support program that guides children into school and on to graduation. But Hanley, the guiding light of hope for families in the garbage dump, perished on the night of January 18 as she was returning from the capital to her home in nearby Antigua after attending meetings to establish the guarderia so that children in Safe Passage could leave their younger siblings in good hands while continuing their studies. Also killed in the accident was her driver Bayron Aroldo Chiquito de Leon, who was at the wheel.

To those children and their families, Hanley was akin to Mother Teresa. In fact, she was often referred to in the Guatemalan media as the “angel of the garbage dump”. As the news of her passing spread through Guatemala City’s poorest slums, mourners gathered throughout the night at the hospital, and crowds packed the streets at a memorial service later that week, especially grieving mothers with young children. “Before meeting her, I never would have imagined that my children would go far in their studies,” Yolanda Campos, a 33-year-old mother of Safe Passage kids, told the national Prensa Libre.

Hanley twice graced our presence in northern Michigan, most recently at last summer’s Fiesta at the Haggerty Center. Great Lakes Friends has raised over $50,000 for Safe Passage since Hanley’s first visit in 2005. Today, nearly 600 children who live around the Guatemala City dump spend their mornings or afternoons at the program where they receive assistance with school work, a healthy meal (often the only one they eat each day), access to a medical clinic, exposure to the arts, and vocational programs in a caring and safe environment. Many of the children in the program are the first in their families to attend school.

“I want the next president of Guatemala to come out of Safe Passage,” says Paul Sutherland.

Tickets to this year’s “Journey to Guatemala” Fiesta on July 17 at the Hagerty Center in Traverse City are $25 each and can be reserved ahead of time by calling (231) 590-6072 or emailing safepassageglf@yahoo.com. More information about Safe Passage is available at www.safepassage.org. If you’re unable to make it, donations in honor of Hanley Denning — to continue her legacy and sustain Safe Passage – can be sent to Great Lakes Friends, P.O. Box 621, Traverse City, MI.