#cairo garbage collectors

By Caroline Davies, BBC News, Cairo, 26 September 2016

It’s the sweet, stifling, nose-crinkling scent that hits you first. Mingled with engine fumes and the whiff of hot sand as we burn up the Cairo motorway, it’s the stink of damp cardboard and decaying fruit. It’s the smell of Garbage City. And for some, it’s the smell of success.

Our taxi jolts through the uneven streets, following a lorry wobbling under its load of compacted cardboard boxes.

Scraps of plastic bags, foil chocolate-bar wrappers and crumbled newspapers are buffeted by the wind, whipped up and mingled with city dust.

Behind the high walls on the outskirts of Cairo is a mostly Coptic Christian community, known as the Zabaleen--a derogatory term for garbage men.

Settling in an abandoned quarry, they became the informal waste disposal experts of the city in the 70s, collecting rubbish from the capital’s streets for free and bringing it back to their homes to recycle it.

Sorting is done by hand--the plastics are separated from the cardboard, the clothes from the organic waste, before they’re sold on to the next layer of the community’s refuse economy.

The various materials are pulverised, melted or pelleted, until all that’s left over are the rotting vegetables.

Even these are fed to the pigs that are kept in towering apartment blocks--their grunts occasionally echo down from the floors above. Garbage City is one of very few areas in Cairo where you can find pork served on street corners.

Today the streets are empty--it’s a Sunday. Up the hill, the Coptic church inside a carved-out cave has a congregation of about 4,000, but this is a sparse turnout compared to high days and holy days, when it can hold up to 20,000 people.

We wander between the long lines of red brick apartment blocks, row after row of balconies decorated with built-in stone crosses.

Shouts bounce off the walls from a children’s football game up the street. Small eyes smile at us from behind vast cubes of compacted aluminium, stacked up like hay bales and glistening in the sunshine.

The sun flashes on a piece of smooth metal. Carefully displayed on the street, on picnic rugs, is an array of pans, plates, rugs, champagne flutes, silver cutlery, 10 suitcases, an electric blender, ruffled silk bedsheets and a slow cooker.

But this is not a market stall. None of these items, my guide explains, is for sale.

“This is a bride’s new home,” he says. “These are her wedding gifts. She leaves them on the street for an afternoon to show all the neighbours how wealthy they are.”

Garbage City may not be paved with gold, but it’s not without opportunity.

The Zabaleen are thought to be some of the most efficient recyclers in the world, and as international demand for recycled materials has increased, new businessmen have built their own companies here.

Trappings of individual success are littered around Garbage City--a scattering of smart-suited young men with designer sunglasses and expensive wristwatches.

We spot Adel’s car before we find him--a sporty, bright orange model, gleaming in the dusty streets.

He’s only dropping by, he says. He left Garbage City and bought a house in one of Cairo’s gated communities--areas with names like Beverly Hills and Hyde Park--but his business is still here.

Opening the shutter to his warehouse, he points out a large wheel of green plastic, as tall as a person.

“I was the first to buy a machine that could create that here,” he says. “It turns plastic bottles into strips of industrial binding. It’s just one part of my business. Now I take in garbage from across Egypt.”

Another machine spits out a perfectly compressed cube of metal, with flashes of faintly recognisable colour from scrunched-up soft drinks cans.

Scaling up his business has worked for Adel.

He now sells his recycled products around the world. His daughter attends a good school in Cairo. He’s a member of one of the city’s illustrious members’ sports clubs.

But it isn’t a secure living. International waste contracts rely on stability and consistency, something in short supply in today’s Egypt. Socially, he’s still in a precarious position.

By Kareem Fahim, NY Times, March 28, 2016

CAIRO--The intricate mural took shape over the past few weeks, little noticed at first, spreading across a harried quarter of Cairo where Egypt’s garbage collectors live, amid overflowing bundles of this overcrowded city’s trash.

By the time the painting was finished two weeks ago, it stretched across more than 50 buildings, making it the largest public work of art here anyone can recall. The mural, a circle of orange, white and blue in Arabic calligraphy, quotes a third-century Coptic Christian bishop who said, “If one wants to see the light of the sun, he must wipe his eyes.”

When the first photographs of the mural circulated, reactions ranged from astonished delight to disbelief. Some people, struck by its seemingly impossible scale, seemed convinced that the images had been digitally altered, according to the man behind the project, a Tunisian-French artist known as eL Seed.

But what seemed most surprising was that Mr. Seed and several friends who worked with him had been able to complete the project at all, without being harassed or arrested.

Egypt’s highhanded government has shown little tolerance for artists, sending agents to raid cultural centers and recently prosecuting a novelist on charges that he had harmed public morality. Street artists who made the city their canvas in the heady days after Egypt’s uprising in 2011 have lately been forced to work hastily or in secret, carrying out projects “as you would a heist,” said Soraya Morayef, who has documented street art over the past five years on her blog.

But Mr. Seed chose a forsaken corner of the city, called Manshiyat Naser, away from the gaze of officials, the kind of place where artists have had more space to work, Ms. Morayef said.

Mr. Seed said he intended to change popular perceptions of the district, too narrowly associated with squalor, and to celebrate decades of unsung work by its residents who sort and recycle tons of the city’s waste. He has painted large works of distinctive calligraphy in other countries over the past few years, including in Brazil, France and Tunisia, but he said the experience in Egypt, and the reaction, were “overwhelming.”

He chalked up the success of the project, which was entirely self-funded, to his decision to work quietly, with the cooperation of residents.

Praise came from the neighborhood, young anti-government activists and other artists.

More than 5,000 people shared a post of Mr. Seed’s mission statement on Facebook, and there were hundreds of mostly positive comments that suggested that he had accomplished his goals. “Beautiful and honest words,” one woman in Egypt wrote. The garbage collectors, she added, “deserve our gratitude.”

Officials seemed taken by surprise. The Egyptian Embassy in Washington promoted the project on its Twitter feed, and said it was “totally amazed.”

As Mr. Seed planned the mural over the past year, he was aided by a local priest, the Rev. Samaan Ibrahim, who is considered a leader of the mainly Coptic garbage collectors in the neighborhood. The priest’s approval and participation in the project in turn brought residents on board, Mr. Seed said.

The neighborhood was established more than four decades ago, with its striking location in the shadow of cliffs and fetid streets making it the most recognizable of several settlements where the city’s garbage collectors live.

But many of its residents are impoverished and continue to be regarded as second-class citizens because of their association with the trash.

Their relations with the government have also been strained. Officials have tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to replace the garbage collectors and their extensive family networks with more-modernized private companies. In one of the most enduring shocks to the area, President Hosni Mubarak’s government, reacting to fears of a swine influenza epidemic in 2009, decided to kill all of Egypt’s pigs, including thousands kept by the garbage collectors, who used them to consume organic waste and who would also sell their meat.

From the streets of the neighborhood, the painting appears in fragments: above a courtyard where members of one family carefully search for recycling in bags of trash, or looming over a rooftop occupied by a handful of sheep. The bracing scale of the mural is fully visible only from the Mokattam Hill on the edge of the district, near a famous cathedral carved inside a cave.

Viewed from there, the colors interrupt the monotonous red brick facades below, distinguishing these buildings from the thousands that have sprung up across the city over decades, with little oversight, to contain Cairo’s bursting population.

In the days after the mural was completed, the residents of Manshiyat Naser seemed not to focus too closely on its message: Many people had yet to trek up the hill for a viewing, and few had any idea what the calligraphy said.

Instead, people seemed moved that Mr. Seed and his friends had bothered to travel to Cairo and immersed themselves in the neighborhood defying the various calamities that have driven away many visitors to Egypt in the past few years. The only complaint was that the artists had not painted more of the houses.

By Merrit Kennedy, AP, Mar 10, 2015

CAIRO (AP)--In a slum inhabited by Cairo’s legions of informal garbage collectors, children in tattered sandals walk down muddy, trash-strewn alleys to get to Mama Maggie’s community center, where their feet are washed, their wounds are dressed and they are encouraged to learn and play.

On a recent day “Mama” Maggie Gobran herself, dressed all in white, washed the face and feet of a young girl who had lost her right arm in a machinery accident before giving her a fresh pair of sandals and sending her off to play with the others. “I want each child to know how much I love them. I appreciate them, I respect them,” she said.

Her organization, called Stephen’s Children after Christianity’s first martyr, has started nearly 90 such centers, and she estimates they have helped more than 30,000 low-income Egyptian families. They focus on Coptic Christians, a minority that has long complained of discrimination, though Gobran says they help Muslim children as well.

These days there are more people in need of her services than ever before. The 2011 uprising that toppled longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak led to years of unrest that have taken a heavy toll on the economy. The informal areas she targets, where impoverished residents string up their own power lines and rig their own water taps, are steadily expanding.

Gobran, a 65-year-old Copt, has worked in such areas for more than three decades and has been compared to Mother Theresa, but she comes from an upper middle-class background. She previously worked as a marketing executive and as a computer science professor at the elite American University in Cairo.

“At the American University, they were very good, but they had other people to go to serve them. But these people, they don’t have any,” she said.

The Manshiyet Nasr slum is home to the city’s trash collectors, who run a vast grass-roots recycling program there. Children in threadbare clothes wander the muddy streets while their parents sift through giant mounds of garbage, much of it hauled by donkey cart from across the city of 18 million.

A different world beckons from inside the community center. In the courtyard, a teacher and a group of giggling kids play with a parachute. Another group draws pictures. Upstairs, a doctor examines a sore on a little girl’s foot, and teenage boys who dropped out of school learn to make leather shoes.

Stephen’s Children has long provided early childhood education programs, which Gobran says are crucial to breaking the generational cycle of poverty, but after the age of seven the children had to rely on the state.

In Egypt’s decrepit public schools, poorly paid teachers often rely on private tutoring and families must pay out of pocket for one-on-one attention. An estimated $2.4 billion is spent every year on private tuition in Egypt, according to the U.N., with the extra expense widely seen as essential for passing exams.

“Teachers need better pay--they’ll extort. Students need better instruction--they’ll go buy it,” says education researcher Motaz Attalla. “These things are really major structural challenges.”

This year, the World Economic Forum ranked Egypt 141 out of 144 countries for quality of education. Despite major advances in recent decades, nearly 30 percent of Egyptian adults are illiterate, according to the U.N.

“Parents would come back and say, now the children have good basics, but we don’t have a good school for them,” said Maha Victor, a coordinator for Stephen’s Children.

In response, the organization opened its first school for older children in 2012 in Khosoos, a poor town north of Cairo.

“Mama Maggie thought of the Farah School because of the problems of education in Egypt. And she chose this neighborhood specifically because it’s one of the most densely populated areas and one of the oldest slums,” said Ines Fawzy Malak, who runs the school.

With its small classes, clean facilities and emphasis on creativity, the Farah School stands in stark contrast to the crowded, unruly classrooms in public schools across the country.

Kindergarteners practice writing English and Arabic letters in a brightly painted classroom. At the morning assembly a student receives a prize for a poem she wrote about Egyptian Christians who were kidnapped and beheaded by Islamic State militants in neighboring Libya. Another is applauded for her athletic achievement.

“This school is a lighthouse for the Khosoos neighborhood. A lot of teachers want to join and be part of the crew. We have a big waiting list for the children,” said Malak.

Gobran hopes to duplicate its success elsewhere. “We have plans even after my lifetime. They will continue every year--a number of schools, a number of centers, a number of people.”