The village outside the garbage heap

At the end of my fieldwork among the Warao, I traveled up to the city Ciudad Guyana. In my village a lot of people had told me about a garbage heap that they used to go to, right outside this city. Ciudad Guyana is a company town, founded in 1961, and has had an extremely fast population growth, and have now over a million inhabitants. Such a city produces a lot of garbage, and in the outskirts there is a area called Cambalache. In Venezuela this place is called a "red zone", indicating that the security situation is not particularly good. On my first trip out to Cambalache I had to ask three different taxi drivers to take me there, and the third one only agreed to take me if I doubled the fee.
I had heard a lot of stories about the place, and almost everyone back in the village had said I would be killed immediately if I went there. They called the garbage heap for Wabanoko - the Cemetery. Even though I know that people in the village exaggerated sometimes, they had managed to make me slightly nervous.
The taxi driver took us into an area that was by far the poorest place I had visited in urban Venezuela. I knew some warao had established a village somwhere close to the river, but I had no idea where it was. As we went further into this area, the poverty manifested itself more and more into the building. The houses where made of plastic, paper boards and roofs made of corrugated iron.
After a while the road got so bad that the taxi driver refused to drive further. I have to admit that I was reluctent to leave the car, but there was no way back now. As the car went away, I started walking further on. After a couple of hundred meters I cought my eye on some young Warao, and I started following them. They had made a camp down by the river, and it corresponded with the discripron I had gotten back home.

The young men seemed nervous and quite uneasy that I walked over to them, and they had porbably been warned about all the dangers of this place themselves. But as I started talking to them in Warao, they went from suppraise to amusement quiqly. I found out that they where from a different part of the delta, and that we had no kinship ties.
After a while they directed me to the "idamo" of the place, the headman, which name was Raimundo, right by where we were sitting. I walked up a hill, and had my first encounter with the Warao headman at Cambalache.

Raimundo was a very hospitable guy, and as it turned out, he came from a naghbouring village, and we soon established some kin relations. He turned out to be a cousin of my mother Anusiata. And even more supprising, I had just met his father a couple of weeks erlier. After exchainging new about the village, I explained why I was there. I told him that I was interested in understanding life at the garbage heap, and that I was going to write a book about it. He agreed to take me to the garbage heap the following day.