[THERAPY NOTES: Is managing your practice stressing you out? Try Therapy Notes. It makes notes, billing, scheduling, and tele-health a whole lot easier. Check it out and you will quickly see why it’s the highest rated EHR on Trustpilot with over 1000 verified customer views and an average customer rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars. You’ll notice the difference from the first day you sign up for a trial. They offer live phone support seven days a week so when you have questions, you can quickly reach out to someone who can help. You are never wasting your time looking for answers. If you’re coming from another EHR, they make the transition really easy. Therapy Notes will import your clients’ demographic data free of charge during your trial so you can get going right away. Use the promo code [JOE], J-O-E to get the first three free months totally free to try it out, no strings attached. Remember telehealth is included with every subscription free. Make 2022, the best year yet with Therapy Notes. Again, use promo code [JOE] to get three months totally free. [JOE SANOK] This is the Practice of The Practice Podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 817. [JOE] I am Joe Sanok, your host, and welcome to the Practice of the Practice Podcast. I hope that you are doing amazing today and you’re ready to be inspired. As on this show, we often cover things around starting, growing and scaling your private practice, a lot of the business stuff, but also we try to weave in just compelling stories, things that people are doing in the world that are cool, just that human side of being a business owner. That’s where we’re going today. I am so excited to have my friend Jacob Wheeler. Jacob is an author and journalist and lives here in Traverse City. Actually, our kids go to school together. We’ve known each other for years off and on, but really it was that school that brought us together but he lives here with his wife, Sarah, and his children, Nina and Leo. He publishes the Glen Arbor Sun newspaper and teaches at Northwestern Michigan College. Jacob fell in love with Central America when he was studying Spanish there, and his first book Between Light and Shadow from University of Nebraska Press covered Guatemala’s Child Adoption Industry. Wheeler’s reporting has won awards from Project Censored and the Michigan Press Association. He’s a native of Denmark and has filed stories from five continents, and his work has appeared in such publications as The Rotarian, Teaching Tolerance in these times, the Christian Science Monitor and Detroit Free Press. Jacob, welcome to the Practice of the Practice Podcast. I’m so excited to have you here. [JACOB WHEELER] Thanks, Joe. It’s really an honor. Thanks for the opportunity to have a conversation with you today. [JOE] We’ve had so many conversations about you writing this book and this project, this new book that just came out, Angel of the Garbage Dump. Let’s just start with how did you get involved, not just with the project, but just with what was happening in Central and South America around this story? [JACOB] Yes, thanks. I spent a good part of my twenties in Guatemala where I learned Spanish, a country I fell in love with for its majestic beauty, the native people’s, learning Spanish, doing, I did some volunteer work there, but also I think as an activist and as a writer and someone from the Empowered Global North I wanted to tell stories about the connections between the United States and Americans and Guatemalans, and ways in which Americans can have a positive impact there. That led to the first book, which you mentioned about Americans adopting Guatemalan children and the intricacies of that story. I became friends with a woman named Hanley Denning, a native of Maine from the Portland, Maine area who launched a really impactful, amazing nonprofit NGO called Safe Passage, or Camino Seguro in Spanish. Basically, Hanley, who was a trained social worker and was doing some volunteer work in Guatemala, but was ready to come back to the United States. On the the final week of her last stay in Guatemala, friend of hers, a nun, Sister Regina, showed her the Guatemala city garbage dump, where thousands of people, mostly single mothers subsist off of the trash left by others, picking through the garbage for food to eat, and also looking for metals and nylons and anything you can imagine to sell in the underground economy. This is one of the largest garbage dumps in the Americas, and it’s a hellish place, I mean, vultures flying above the dump are competing with humans for what’s left there. There are rats and snakes in the dump, methane gases bubbling up from the ground, causing fires. The pollution is rampant. Gangs are active in this area, and dump dead bodies in the dump. They recruit boys into gangs, girls, force them into prostitution. It’s just, it’s a terrible environment. Hanley saw this and felt she couldn’t turn the other cheek, she couldn’t turn the other way. She fell compelled to action. She called her parents back in Maine and said, I’m not coming home. Send me, sell my car, sell my computer, wire me the money to Guatemala City. Hanley launched essentially what became a school for the children of the Guatemala City garbage dump for the children of the guaheros, the term for garbage pickers. She convinced a priest of a local underused Catholic church next to the dump to let her use his church on non-worship days as a drop-in center where the guahero could bring their children to learn and be in a safe environment and to dream of a life beyond the garbage dump. But in the early days, Hanley had to convince everyone that this was important. She had to convince the priests, she had to convince the local school teachers that these families, the guaheros were worth saving that they could be helped, that these children were worth an education. At first, the guahero families didn’t understand the importance of school. They were reluctant to bring their children to Hanley because their children were helpful to them in the garbage dump. I mean, you can imagine an eight or 10 year old with long, skinny hands could actually help pick with the piles of garbage. Hanley literally bribed the mostly single mothers with bags of rice and beans and olive oil, food, which is the most important currency in our world, bribed them with food so they would bring their children to her. By and by she grew this incredible organization, Safe Passage/Camino Seguro changed hundred, the lives of hundreds of families, thousands of children. The growth of the organization was painstaking. Hanley was very much a revolutionary, a manic, she hardly ever slept, hardly ever ate. Those who volunteered with her and then later worked with her as she had the money to employ people, both Guatemalans and expats who were down there, they were inspired by her, but keeping up with her was difficult because she expected the same manic commitment out of you too. There were incredible stories that came out of what it was like to work with them. I mean, her deputy, Letti Mendez, hours after giving birth to her first child, Hanley, was on the phone with her, asking her to come into the office. Hanley begrudgingly several years after launching the project begrudgingly began to seek out donors and people with business acumen in the United States to form a board of directors which has a Michigan connection. Paul Sutherland, a local financial investment manager here in Traverse City, became the first chair of the board of directors. Luckily, a board of directors forms in 2005, five years after she launches her project in the Guatemala City garbage dump because it gave the organization sustainability as it was growing very quickly, as she was caring for 500 children, not a hundred children. Hanley dies suddenly in a car accident in January 18th, 2007, seven years after the project launches. It was an incredible blow to the organization. The guaheros, the Guatemalans, literally, they personified the organization and her, they didn’t understand that they were, by then lots of other gringos who were helping by volunteering, by working, by writing checks, by running the organization. They thought that their children would be sent back to the garbage dump when she is killed in this car accident. If it weren’t for the board of directors and the viability of the organization by then, it probably folds when she dies. But Safe Passage/Camino Seguro has continued. It’s doing great things today. I mean, it’s changed the trajectory of the lives of thousands of families in zone three of Guatemala City, one of the most impoverished areas. That’s the story in a nutshell. My book is a story of Hanley Denning and how she changed the world, one child at a time. It’s also the story of this community of this organization that she founded, which continues to change countless lives today. It’s the story of those who worked with her and were around her, who, most of whom have moved on from Safe Passage/Camino Seguro, but are doing other really impactful work in Guatemala, in the United States and everywhere. I stayed at one point that Hanley in her work and her dream, she cast the stone but everyone who was touched by her work and continues to do humanitarian work today, they are the ripples, the ripples that continue to ripple across the water. [JOE] I’m wondering, as a journalist, as someone that reports and tells stories and dives deep into stories, oftentimes your own writing personality or that side of it maybe isn’t front and center because you’re telling someone else’s story. But for you personally, what did you discover in writing this book that’s changed or impacted you? [JACOB] It’s a good question, Joe. I mean, one of, maybe one of the thesis, a central thesis in this book was examining this question, why when so many of us go to a place, to Guatemala or a place like Guatemala to have an, to experience, to learn about the south, to learn about the lives of others, to do some humanitarian volunteer work, learn language, most of us come back to our comfortable lives. I did, I live in Traverse City with a beautiful young family, but I wanted to examine what was it about Hanley Denning that compelled her to stay in this very difficult environment and essentially, in the end, become almost a martyr for the cause because she died there doing that. I don’t know that I ever entirely answer that question of what compelled her to stay. Certainly there were pangs, in researching and writing this, there were pangs of why am I here living the easy life? Why didn’t I have this? Why couldn’t I offer this level of commitment? I have merely written a story about it. I don’t know if that gets to your question or not, but it’s a question I’ve asked myself often. [JOE] Well, I mean, how are you wrestling with that? Even if you haven’t answered it, how are you wrestling with, I mean, like, I’ve been to City Solei in Porta Prince and same sort of thing, like went and volunteered in Haiti, but yes, like, I mean, I’m changed in some ways, but I mean, I didn’t move there. So for you, how are you wrestling with how to deal with that? Because I think that sure, not everyone can leave and do that, but also you’re doing important things, being a strong father and being a social justice warrior and writing about these things but how do you come to terms with comparing yourself to this lady that you’ve been studying? [JACOB] Well, I hope that the story I’ve told will reach a lot of eyes. I hope will inspire people, especially young people, especially young people who maybe are taking a year off into high school and college or looking for an adventure to have, but an opportunity to change the world in their small way. I hope it will inspire people to avoid looking the other way when they see poverty, when they see homelessness, whether it’s in Guatemala or on their city block here in the United States. I hope it’ll inspire people. Writing this book during the pandemic was difficult and it certainly set it back a bit but I’m thrilled that it’s published now. But I also think that hopefully this book can be something of a, I’m reluctant to use the word post-pandemic, post-Covid, because it’s not quite right but I hope that as we begin to reemerge and travel again and look for opportunities to see the world and embrace our global community, that this is the story or the right story for that time to see how we too can change the world. Hanley on some of her trips back to Maine or Michigan or North Carolina or New York or Boston, to raise money and to tell fellow Americans about her project and to seek support, she faced the question a couple times well, why don’t I just support a project here in the United States? Her answer was, well you don’t have to support Safe Passage. You don’t have to support my project in the Guatemala City garbage dump. If you see a need right here, support that but don’t let yourself be paralyzed by the inequities of the world. Do something, look anywhere, do good work, support a project anywhere. I think that’s it. I think that she offered us a timeless, what I hope readers will see is, it’s a timeless lesson whether you’re interested in Guatemala or not. This is about seeing poverty, seeing inequities, seeing hopelessness, and being able to break down some, being willing to break down some barriers to change lives and leave your mark [JOE] Now, how much were you able to dig into her history before going to Guatemala? [JACOB] I knew Hanley a little bit, not well. In the years before I committed to writing this book I knew her story. I knew what I could almost call, of the cliche. I mean, girl from a wealthy family goes to Guatemala, devotes her life to the garbage dump community. It wasn’t until I began to talk with both Americans and Europeans and also Guatemala’s on social media, who I knew and I knew had run alongside with her, that I began to realize that there was more to this story. There was more than the cliche. She was, because she was manic and so devoted, she could be challenging and difficult to work with. She had premonitions of dying in a car accident. She had fears of, of driving or traffic in Guatemala. I began to realize there was a lot more to the story than met the eye and then suddenly it felt like a book to me. Also the fact that her project is still alive and doing great work today, it felt like a story for now, even though she’s been gone for more than 15 years. What was interesting in writing the book and I began, I traveled to Guatemala in 2018, I traveled to Maine in 2019, and then the writing really began in earnest in 2020. I hoped to have the book ready for a big 20 year celebration of the project in the summer of 2020. Well, of course, we all know what happened in the spring of 2020, the world shut down, which delayed the project. I didn’t know how to bring the story to the present. She died in 2007, which felt like eons ago. Covid, as a writer gave me the opportunity to bring to bring the story to the present. I spent quite a bit of time talking with a current executive director of Safe Passage/Camino Seguro, a guy from Florida named Trey Holland. In our interviews via Zoom and WhatsApp, he walked me through how Hanley’s project, Safe Passage/Camino Seguro has withstood and survived and really thrived during Covid, especially those difficult, confusing early months, March, April, may, June of 2020, how Hanley’s Project did some really innovative ways, things to get food, medical supplies and cellphone-based curriculum to the students of the garbage dump even though they stayed in the garbage dump, they couldn’t come to school during Covid. None of us could. Safe Passage did innovative things to get water to the garbage dump community when the municipal water supply in the city, Guatemala City basically shut down. Safe Passage brought food to local policemen in the local precinct when they got Covid and the city abandoned them. I mean, here’s this project that was created by Hanley 22 years ago, 20 years ago, speaking in 2020 that really grew because of the trust she created between the Guahero Garbage Picker community and the institution she started. That trust, allowed the project to do amazing, innovative things during this global pandemic, global lockdown. That, for me, brought the story out of the present. So I closed the book talking about how Safe Passage has continued to serve this community through Covid. [PILLARS OF PRACTICE] We brought together all of our checklists, videos, and other free things in one spot, so you don’t have to opt in all over the place just to get another checklist. We’ve put it all together over at pillarsofpractice.com. Whether you’re just getting started or have an established group therapy practice, we have a free e-course for you as well. We have eight-minute experts, which are short eight-minute videos around specific topics completely free. So if you want to take your practice to the next level, head on over to pillarsofpractice.com to get access to our free e-courses. Again, that’s pillarsofpractice.com to get all of those free e-courses. [JOE SANOK] Now, tell us a little bit about your process, because I think that as writers, as thinkers, as therapists, when we create content for other people, sometimes knowing where to start, where to cut, where to fill in is such an art. What’s your process look like in just taking a person’s life, a community, a different country? I mean, there’s so much you could cover and probably 90% of it ends up not being in the book. What was that process like? Walk us through that a little bit. [JACOB] Well, I interviewed a hell of a lot of people. Obviously, the book is about the journey of a person, but of course, she’s no longer with us. She’s dead. So I interviewed, I don’t know, I didn’t count, maybe 100 people, Guatemalans and expats in Guatemala, a lot of Mainers, a lot of Michiganders in person, then a lot of interviews via various internet apps. I just asked them, reconstruct a story. Tell me what you remember about meeting Hanley. Tell me about how in your eyes she evolved as her project grew. Tell me how you changed, hone in on some of the key events of the project, when the school finally opened, when the garbage dump caught on fire in 2005. Then walk me through your experience, your memory of the day she died. Of course, everyone remembered blow by blow that terrible day. No, I didn’t use every perspective, every interview in the book, but I use a lot of voices in the story which can be, it can be a challenge when you use so many different voices, but the tie, the strand that weaves them all together is, this is all about a person, the journey that she led all of us on. There was a point where I was doing so many interviews with people again in Guatemala and the US mostly, there was a point when I could finish their sentences. They were describing a scene seeing children in the nursery and I could finish the sentence because I knew exactly who else was there in that room and what was about to happen. That’s when I realized I had done enough interviews. I had to write the darn book [JOE] Then were you more of like a whiteboard person, like little post-it notes? Did you have something, just like the actual function of writing it to me is always interesting too. How’d you organize all that information? [JACOB] Oh, I had a few different ways. I mean, I had some post-it notes. I printed out an early draft, which was very, very, very, very long. Well, actually no, I printed out transcripts, hundreds of pages of transcripts of interviews both in English and in Spanish and I would go through with multicolored markers and mark through themes, often by year, maybe green is the early days when Hanley first launches the project. Red is when she begrudgingly forms the board of directors and pushes back on those who saw the project in terms of dollars and cents, and said, well, you have to cap the number of kids at 500. Yes, I mean, I would mark the transcript by colors, by theme and that allowed me to structure it. The book in the end, it is told chronologically. The opening scene is when actually when the vultures above come down to the garbage dump and see these two white women who don’t fit in looking there as they observe the garbage dump. I attempt to make it a movie-like scene where you see the garbage dump from above and then, and then come down. Then it, again, it’s chronological, it brings us all the way forward through the growth of the project, through her death, the years since, and to the present where it continues to change lives today, even during the pandemic. [JOE] Now I want to go back to her personality and being just, you said even sometimes manic. What do you think, I mean, I’ve read Steve Jobs’ biography, Elon Musk’s and other people’s biographies where oftentimes these movers and shakers are so over the top that like, they just are obsessive almost about things. Then we also hear things like we have to slow down in order to like, do our best work or to be creative. It feels like there’s sometimes this push and pull between creatives that are just insanely passionate and focused and then living a healthy life and pacing out our work that we do. What are your thoughts on that push and pull of those two dynamics? [JACOB] Absolutely. I mean, I make some small illusions in the book to other revolutionaries, whether it’s Jane Adams Hull or it’s Mother Teresa, or it’s the late Dr. Paul Farmer who started the Partners in Hell. I think Hanley had some of those qualities. She was a revolutionary and she was manic in her devotion to her cause. She was hard to follow because she expected others to also be able to work until 2:00 AM, catch the bus back to the colonial town of Antigua where you stayed and then come back on the bus at 6:00 AM and hardly eat and if you needed to eat, you maybe ate food claimed from the dump, which is what the people you serve were eating. Yes, these are common traits. I think once we meet her and watch her dream and watch the incredible barriers she breaks down to give education to these children, we begin to see that dynamic of her. We begin to see, and this is told through many of the people who worked with her how there was that obsessive nature, which wasn’t sustainable in a way. It plays out in humorous ways. It plays out in difficult ways. I think I shared the story of her deputy Letti, who was called into the office just hours after getting birth via cesarean section. People almost couldn’t believe that she had this energy. Hanley before she came to Guatemala, she was a track star in Maine. She was a track star at Bowen College. So I use her running, the tenacity of her long distance running as something of a metaphor. She came from a family of bankers and star basketball players and runners so sports become a key metaphor. Yes, but it was interesting when she consents to forming a board of directors, and when she consent to giving up a little bit of power in her organization, people who would make the project financially sustainable, but also force her to put some systems in place to keep this going, which allowed it to live even after she died. Her friend and the first board chair, Paul Sutherland from here in northern Michigan, he forced her to take some time off, sleep in once in a while. He sent her popular magazines like People and Vogue. He sent her chocolate bars from the States to try to get her to chill out. They tried to buy her, the board of directors tried to buy her a car but of course, because she was afraid of driving in Guatemala, she sold it immediately. They convinced her to get two dogs to become almost a stand-in for a family. She never had children. But it was interesting to watch that interplay between the people closest to her who realized that if she were to live something of a sustainable life, she would have to focus more, on things more than just her work and the Guatemala City garbage dump families. [JOE] So how much do you think that real social change happens through that level of focus? [JACOB] Oh, it’s a good question. I mean, I hope this answers, this is attempt to answer your question, I don’t know if anyone, but someone like Hanley with her tenacity could have gone into a place like the Guatemala City garbage dump and seen the potential of these children to go to school and seen the way to convince their parents to send them to school by giving them food. I think most people would’ve seen the garbage dump, the nature of that place, the nature of the corrugated tin walled shanty villages built around the dump where people lived, tried to live dozens of people to a room and they would’ve seen a hopeless situation. They wouldn’t have seen a way out for these children. I think that Hanley’s optimism, her boldness, perhaps her stubbornness but her devotion, which was a very unique quality, was the path forward for this. Most of us couldn’t have done that. [JOE] Well, the last question I always ask is, if every private practitioner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know? [JACOB] What would I want them to know? I mean, what I want them to know is what I hope that every reader of my book, Angel of the Garbage Dump takes away, which is that you can be the Hanley Denning or the Mother Teresa, or the Paul Farmer, or the Jane Adams Hall. You can see desperation, inequity, poverty but you can make a change. You can step in, you can step forward despite the naysayers around you who say, these people are beyond hope, or these children shouldn’t go to our school because they’re full of lice or they’re criminals. Or why should I give you my Catholic church and non-worship days should turn into a school? Look for opportunities to make the world a better place. Don’t be afraid to break down some barriers and dream and be creative along the way. That’s what I would say. [JOE] So good. If people want to get your book, if they want to read it, and where, where can they find it? [JACOB] Check out the book’s website, angelofthegarabagedump.com. You’ll see a link at the top that’ll send you to page on Amazon, where you can buy a copy of the book or an eBook. On my website, I describe a bit more of the book. I show some photos of Hanley and the garbage dump. I post excerpts and a list of upcoming events where I have been speaking, will be speaking. I had the great pleasure of going in October last month to Maine to speak at Bowen College, at a church in Portland, Maine, to speak to Hanley’s initial supporters in the Maine community, present the book and thank them for their support of Hanley. Then I’ve been in Guatemala where we’re doing a couple of events again at the project at Safe Passage to celebrate the book and celebrate Hanley’s story. The project Safe Passage has been a big supporter of the book, which I’m thrilled about. This really is their origin story. But there’ll be events coming up in Traverse City, Michigan and likely elsewhere, so please check it out. My email address is on the page, angelofthegarbagedump.com, and I hope you’ll reach out to me with reflections or thoughts. [JOE] Well, Jacob, thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice Podcast. [JACOB] Thanks, Joe. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for all that you do. [JOE] I love when people go after projects that are uncertain. Writing a book, it’s uncertain. It’s not always a financial thing, it’s a, wow, this is a compelling story that the world needs to hear. To dig into some of the story, but also dig into some of Jacob’s approach to the story is just so amazing and to really be able to think about, well, like, what’s the impact that we want to make on the world? What’s our little corner that we can push into that we can help people, that we can dive into? I want to just encourage you to take some action. As you hear these stories, as you listen to the podcast, don’t just consume, go do something with what you’re consuming. If you’re looking for some guidance we have an amazing free e-course called Pillars of Practice over at pillarsofpractice.com. There’s two different tracks, one is for new practices that are just getting going. Another one is for people growing a practice, either a solo practice or a group practice. Within this course, we have eight-minute experts. They’re short eight-minute videos to help you get the most out of your time. We have checklists, we have all sorts of different freebies within there. You used to have to opt-in for every single little thing. We decide we’re just going to dump it all in one spot. It’s over at pillarsofpractice.com. Thank you so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have a great day. We’ll talk to you soon. Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, the producers, the publishers, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.