First in a series  By M.E. Jones   HARVARD -- The film "Girl
Rising" opens with a young woman in a colorful silk costume
standing alone on a stage. There is music and she begins to
dance, her limbs artfully poised, hands moving in graceful,
stylized motions, like butterfly wings.  For years, the narrator
says, this beautiful dancer was "a child of the dump."  The
scene shifts to a squalid, scary landscape made of rubbish;
people are rummaging through mountains of it, most of them
children. The dancer was one of those "discarded orphans"
picking through the trash heaps, the narrator says, hoping to
find sellable scraps while taking care not to step on the needle
tip of a disease-infected hypodermic syringe.  The girl was a
"throwaway thing" in a dark world then, but she dreamed of
bright possibilities, imagining herself in a clean, crisp school
uniform. She dreamed of books.  Now, she dances, smiling, no
longer a lost child but still sheltering her dreams. It's her
story to tell now, to write herself, the narr