Editor’s Note: BDN copy editor Tracy Collins spent six weeks in Guatemala last summer mentoring teenage girls through the Safe Passage program.

Seven years ago, Hanley Denning watched the dump trucks unload.

The Yarmouth woman saw for the first time Guatemalans, knee-deep in the bags, digging through banana peels, oily newsprint, broken glass, used needles, poisonous waste, discarded corpses, looking for anything to resell.

Women and children worked through the garbage side by side with hundreds of vultures.

Before that day, she had no intention of staying in Guatemala. It wasn’t even on her radar. She was just a Mainer in Guatemala studying Spanish.

But now, those children spend their mornings and afternoons in the classrooms at Safe Passage, an organization Hanley founded to provide education and support to the youngsters. Today, those children are mourning.

The headline reporting the car crash read: “Maine activist killed in Guatemala.”

The children mourn, but they also will study their times tables and read “Jorge el Curioso” and “El Autobus Magico” sitting on the laps of volunteers.

Six of the Safe Passage teenagers will spend part of their day at Kinal, one of the most prestigious schools in the country. Months ago, they aced an admissions exam. They nailed interviews with the school’s director. They beat out scores of applicants. Their moms jumped up and down and sobbed when Hanley told them the good news.

On the streets of Antigua, Guatemala, home of Safe Passage’s orphanage, Guatemalans will walk the cobblestone streets wearing donated shirts that read, “Portland Sea Dogs” or “Camden, Maine.”

A handful of Maine volunteers thousands of miles away from home will play card games with the children and teach English. When those volunteers meet Fredy, a longtime Guatemalan volunteer, and tell him they are from Maine, he will laugh at them and say, “Como todo el mundo.” “Like all the world.”

This unlikely friendship of Guatemala and Maine is what I know of Hanley. Maine’s donations of money, supplies and time go to Guatemala, and Guatemalan kids begin to believe that they could be a secretary or an engineer or a teacher or the president. They learn why it’s bad to sniff glue and drink rubbing alcohol like their parents do. They make it to fifth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade, high school, in a country where education sometimes caps at third grade, in a country where elections are driven more by wealth than competence.

In Guatemala City, knee-deep in trash and face-to-face with mothers who had nothing, Hanley saw motivation underneath despair. Working against tremendous odds – child abuse, neglect, drug addiction, theft, alcoholism – Hanley built hope.

Closer to home, she saw selflessness in Mainers in an age when injustice can so quickly harden us. Even as the American dream dictates that we strive to accumulate fortune to buy a big house, drive a flashy car, raise children and take vacations to Aruba and Honolulu, she believed in the generosity of the people of Bangor, Boothbay, Portland, Kittery, New Sweden, Skowhegan.

Safe Passage in Guatemala and family and friends in Maine mourn for Hanley. The children, it has been said, feel they have lost a mother figure. But listen closely: “All of Safe Passage is sad,” one Safe Passage member said Wednesday from the offices in Antigua. “But we must move forward.”

How apropos that condolence cards to the Denning family feel more like thank-you notes, profound thanks for an example of bravery and ambition that we might not believe if we hadn’t seen it with our own eyes.

For information on Safe Passage, visit www.safepassage.org.

Send donations to Safe Passage, P.O. Box 663, Yarmouth 04096. Tracy Collins may be reached at collinstb@gmail.com.