Muck and brass plates

摘要

For more than 20 years Carmen Lasso has scrabbled a living of sorts for herself and her eight children by scavenging at a rubbish dump in Cali, Colombia's third-largest city. Her life has brought the occasional pleasant surprise, such as the silver ring crowned with a tiny light-blue stone that she gleaned from the trash, and now wears. Another came in April when Colombia's Constitutional Court ruled that she and tens of thousands of her fellow wastepickers should be officially recognised as "entrepreneurs".