SUTTONS BAY — Imagine getting a long-distance call from your daughter, far away in a foreign country, who tells you, “Mom, I am not coming home. There is something I have to do here. I have found a project to help people in desperate need of hope.”
She was warm in her tone, but her mother knew she meant it.
From Maine, and then, Guatemala, Hanley Denning became known as the “Angel of the Garbage Dump,” for her work in poverty’s most desperate form. Denning launched an educational reinforcement nonprofit called Safe Passage (“Camino Seguro”) to help the children who gathered their daily food from the dumpsite in Guatemala City, one of the largest urban landfills in the Americas.
Denning helped pull thousands of children out of overwhelming filth before her untimely death in 2007 in a car crash, but Safe Passage continues to change lives today.
The organization’s connections to Traverse City solidified in 2005 when the Great Lakes Friends of Safe Passage hosted a “friendraiser’ at the Hagerty Center at Northwestern Michigan College.
Denning arrived in Traverse City three days before the event, meeting with Glen Arbor’s Paul Sutherland and his mother Mary to prepare for it and a presentation to Paul’s Rotary Club group.
Denning also met with friend Marilyn Fitzgerald, the clinical psychologist and author who connected her with Paul Sutherland. Marilyn worked in an office above the Omelette Shoppe half a block from Paul’s Traverse City office.
“We stayed upstairs and talked for about three hours,” Marilyn remembered. “We just laughed and cried and talked about the pressure, the realities of the situation she had created.”
The friendraiser and project attracted philanthropists, including Michiganders who traveled to Central America and wanted to help, and the region became a lucrative source of donations and child sponsorships, plus understanding as school groups traveled to Guatemala for service-learning. Annual “fiesta” fundraisers, organized by the Great Lakes Friends raised $20,000-$30,000 yearly, estimated member Sharon Workman, and Hanley returned in 2006 for another riveting presentation on her work.
On her visit, even as Denning visited beautiful places like the Sleeping Bear Dunes, she never truly left Guatemala City, recalled Workman. She and Wayne Workman hosted Denning and another Safe Passage employee during the 2006 trip at their house on Little Traverse Lake.
“I remember her commenting on how beautiful it (Lake Michigan) was, but most of the time while we were walking, she just talked about Safe Passage and what was going on at the project,” said Sharon. “Her focus was constantly on her work.”
Jacob Wheeler, co-editor and publisher of the Glen Arbor Sun, tells Denning’s story in his new book, “Angel of the Garbage Dump: How Hanley Denning Changed the World, One Child at a Time.”
Wheeler met Denning in the summer of 2005 on her first fundraising trip to Michigan, and had his own connection to Guatemala, where traveled and studied Spanish at the Proyecto Linguistico Quetzaltenango in 2003.
“I was intoxicated by Guatemala,” Wheeler said of his time in the “extraordinarily beautifully landscaped country, with volcanic black sand beaches.”
“I was traveling as a writer, a student, and an activist. I wanted to make an impact.”
Wheeler’s first book, “Between Light and Shadow (University of Nebraska Press, 2011),” covered Guatemala’s child adoption industry, and in his research he met Denning.
“I didn’t know Hanley well, but I was aware of the incredible work she was doing. And like others have said, the mere 15-30 minutes I got to spend with Hanley felt like much, much more. She had that presence,” Wheeler said.
Today, Wheeler lives in Traverse City with his wife Sarah and their two children, Nina and Leo. Along with the Glen Arbor Sun, he advises student journalists at Northwestern Michigan College. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he decided to write a book about Hanley after many conversations with those close to her — ex-pats and Guatemalans alike — including her family in Maine, Wheeler said.
The picture of Denning that emerged was far more complex — and interesting — than the angelic, saint-like image we all heard about,” he said.
“She was inspirational and amazing, but also manic, impulsive, stubborn, driven, sometimes hard to work with and for — all the qualities of a revolutionary who breaks down barriers and sees possibilities where others refuse to look,” Wheeler said.
He wanted to examine what compelled Denning to stay in this very difficult environment and essentially, become a martyr for the cause because she died there doing that work, Wheeler said.
“A central question I examined in this book was, ‘Why did Hanley stay in Guatemala and do that hard, important work when so many of us return to our comfortable lives in the global north? Why did she stay?’” Wheeler said, adding that it was partly an “autobiographical question.”
“Writing this book about Guatemala — a place I love — was also therapeutic, in part because I wrote the bulk of the book during the COVID-19 pandemic, when travel was near impossible,” Wheeler said. The process of writing ‘Angel of the Garbage Dump’ allowed me to travel back there in my mind and on the page.”
He recently was able to return to Guatemala on a book tour, where he presented it to the Safe Passage community, including Denning’s former co-workers and friends, and students who left the garbage dump and are succeeding, emotionally and professionally.
One young woman, Iris Ramirez, who once sorted nylon stockings with her mother in the dump, is now in medical school in Guatemala City.
Wheeler hopes that readers will see Hanley Denning as inspiring, “but also human” and someone who a young activist could follow.
“I hope my book inspires some reader(s) to seek out humanitarian work, to stare down poverty or hopeless situations and commit to making a difference,” said Wheeler.
“If you see a need right where you are, support that, but don’t let yourself be paralyzed by the inequities of the world. Do something, look anywhere. Do good work, and support a project anywhere.”