Treasure Hunting

I was on my brother’s bike passing a vacant lot when I saw these people rummaging through sludge looking for treasures. (These trucks vacuum sludge from drain canals.) Usually it’s the children that do this. Every afternoon, on my way to my afternoon walks. I can see children, some still in their school uniforms, feeling through the sludge looking for coins. What is surprising is that these children are not really that poor because they wear decent clothes and they look healthy enough for me to say that they were not that desperate in life. I heard some of them do this so that they can have money to play computer games.

One afternoon I saw this man checking out a ring found by a boy. The man was trying to haggle with the boy; he was offering five hundred pesos for the ring. I could hear them because the man was loud; he was almost pleading. Five hundred pesos, that’s a lot of money for a child. The ring must be worth a lot of money. I was just passing so I don’t know what happened to the ring. I hope it’s not Frodo’s ring because I hate to see Orcs attacking our humble town.

Anyway, news must have gotten around of treasures in the sludge. Trucks that arrive in this vacant lot are now awaited by children and adults alike. Some are so “greedy” that they can’t even wait for the trucks to complete the dumping--these are dump trucks and some of them tilt and fall and could crush them. But what are these risks if they can find treasures in an hour or so of hunting.