
SAO PAULO: A holiday story that emerged from an unlikely place took a heartwarming turn when Gabriel Silva, a Brazilian boy photographed pulling a Christmas tree from a garbage dump, managed to help buy his family a house.
The story began in the weeks before Christmas last year, when AFP photojournalist Joao Paulo Guimaraes captured a picture of Silva, then 12, pulling a small plastic Christmas tree from a fetid mountain of trash swarmed by vultures and impoverished trash-pickers in the town of Pinheiro, in northeastern Brazil.