Thirty people are gathered around a fire where Raphael’s aunt is boiling rice and roasting a chicken purchased with some of Raphael’s found money. Raphael pockets the items and returns to work to avoid drawing attention to himself.Īfter dark, five police officers arrive-a rare occurrence in a shantytown, where locals sort out their own problems.
The key has a yellow plastic tag and the number 101. Also, two photos of a girl in a school uniform. There is an ID card for a thirty-three-year-old houseboy named José Angelico. Raphael and Gardo celebrate as Raphael gives his friend 500 pesos. The fat wallet contains eleven hundred pesos-“good money” in a place where a chicken costs one hundred and eighty pesos. Inside the bag is a wallet, a folded map, and a key. Out of it falls a small leather bag covered in coffee grounds. One day, Raphael’s and Gardo’s world turns upside down when Raphael finds a “special” bag of trash, meaning an unbroken bag from a rich area. The boys search for plastic, paper, metal, glass, cloth, rubber-anything they can either sell or reuse. He, like everyone else, hopes to find something valuable, but mostly what they find is “stupp,” their word for human excrement wrapped in paper, since most of the people in his impoverished city don’t have toilets or running water in the boxes they live in. Along with his friend Gardo, Raphael is a “dumpsite boy.” He has spent the past eleven years sifting through trash in a dump in a shantytown called Behala. Narrated from the first-person perspective by multiple narrators, Trash opens in the voice of one of the book’s protagonists, fourteen-year-old Raphael Fernández.
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