#zabaleen

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.

I've been thinking a lot about the New Yorker piece by Peter Hessler that I shared a few days ago (What the Garbageman Knows), in which Hessler follows around his building's garbageman as he makes his rounds and navigates Cairo's mostly informal garbage collection system. When my friend first sent it to me he prefaced it by writing "I don't know if you leave with much from this piece" but, "anything Cairo is a treat." The writing is excellent, of course, and the story of Sayyid and the Zabaleen - trash collectors - and waste management in Cairo is fascinating. But I was maybe a little too nostalgia'd up from the piece to read it critically at first, and a few things have begun to really bother me about it.

Photograph by Rena Effendi

The essential question is, what does Sayyid the garbageman actually know about Hessler and the piece written about him in the New Yorker? Hessler never fully explains their relationship in a professional sense as a writer and his subject, but instead portrays their relationship as mutually beneficial friendship; Hessler pays Sayyid to pick up his trash and Sayyid, who is illiterate, asks Hessler to help identify intriguing objects he finds on his rounds and sometimes they have tea together in each other's homes. In other words, pretty equal. 

But of course only one of them is being paid to write an essay in a prestigious magazine about the other who would not only need the essay to be read aloud to him, but also translated. Hessler notes that he changed the names of his Zamalek neighbors but he doesn't say if he has also changed the name of Sayyid and other identifying features like his wife's name and where they live and the angry text messages she sends Sayyid, and so on. We can assume Hessler doesn't want to negatively impact Sayyid's well-being, but it would be really helpful if Hessler could specifically state if he changed details about Sayyid and that Sayyid explicitly agreed to the piece being written about him.

And it is easy to imagine why Sayyid might not want the piece to be written. Besides publishing the text messages from his wife as they began divorce proceedings, Hessler reveals how much Sayyid knows about his neighbors from their trash, including sex pills, medical issues, alcohol use and landlord bribery to let the trash of certain residents accumulate. Hessler writes that Cairo is a city of over 17 million, but Zamalek, the prosperous northern tip of an island in the Nile between downtown Cairo and the shores of Giza, is a relatively small and sparsely-populated neighborhood. It wouldn't be very difficult to find out where Hessler lives and thus who Sayyid is.

Just as importantly, Sayyid is not the only person who could be affected. I also posted the New Yorker piece on the community weblog MetaFilter, and a Cairo resident weighed in, sharing a link to a "Not-In-My-BackYard-ish Zamalek neighborhood organization's Facebook page" that essentially accuses "Sayyid" of spying (link to Facebook page of Zamalek Guardians) It includes the picture published along with the article, implying the man pictured to be Sayyid, while also opening up all the Zabaleen to similar accusations.

"Looks like Said [the garbageman] is spying on us" (Source), it says. A couple commenters also claim to have had Sayyid as their garbageman, so it appears his name was not changed, although no one has said whether the photo is actually of him. Still, the wealth of information provided in the article is more than enough to identify Sayyid and reveal the (presumably true) intimate details and struggles of his relationship with his wife.

I've liked almost everything Hessler has written for the New Yorker since he moved to Cairo in 2011, and I want to be forgiving about this piece. Some of the essay has to do with Mubarak's unsuccessful and inefficient attempt to use foreign waste management companies to modernize the Zabaleen system, and some of the piece deals with the intricacies of divorce proceedings in Cairo, but it all comes back to Sayyid. Is there much chance Sayyid had a full understanding of how prevalent the New Yorker is if and when he agreed to the piece?

Hessler's essay begins with a description of the ambiguous 'contract' his building and landlord has with Sayyid. It's a situation that, without further details from the author on his relationship to Sayyid and Sayyid's knowledge of Hesler's writing, can't help but feel prescient:

As Sayyid Ahmed collects trash in Peter Hessler’s Cairo neighborhood, he reveals the contradictions of life in modern Egypt.

By Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times, October 25, 2012 CAIRO--Trucks haul garbage away, but by nightfall trash bags seem to breed across boulevards and alleys, rising like a foul tide until men and boys, hands quick as birds, scavenge for tin foil flashing in the rising sun.

Trash tumbles and blows, sits in clumps, blocks traffic, smothers canals, tangles in trees and gives this overcrowded city the fly-buzz hum of something not quite right. There is much wrong in Egypt these days, but few things are as irritating and noxious as piles of rotting waste.

"It's affected my breathing. You wouldn't believe how many medicines I'm on," said Sayed Abdelalim, garbage spilling out of a neighborhood dump and coiling down his street. "I have to buy two inhalers a week. We complain to the government, but it's like talking to ourselves."

The trash deluge is part of an array of social and economic setbacks facing this nation since last year's overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. Power outages, crime and fears that subsidies may be cut on bread and propane have unnerved the poor and middle class. Garbage has become another metaphor, a black-humor shorthand, for explaining all that doesn't work.

President Mohamed Morsi launched a "Clean Homeland" campaign when he was inaugurated in June. The program has made some improvements, but trash collection is an underfunded and disorganized network of private contractors, state agencies, street sweepers and Coptic Christian garbage collectors, known as zabaleen, who have been an informal but integral part of the refuse business for generations.

Cairo reportedly generates 14,000 tons of garbage a day--8,000 picked up by zabaleen and various contractors, leaving 6,000 to litter sidewalks and corners, where sheep headed for slaughter dine on the contents of split-open bags. The problem has been complicated by a cultural mind-set that trash can be tossed anywhere in an ancient metropolis soured by cement dust and factory grit.

It is a shifting landscape, an unspoken war: People in one neighborhood drop trash in another in a cycle that leaves no street safe.

"We are suffering in one of the most polluted cities in the world," said Ahmed Abrass, an environmentalist. "We have typhoid.... When you pollute the air, it affects your mind, your well-being. The Ministry of Environment is very unorganized and unresponsive. Simply collecting the trash won't help. We need a better way of disposal."

Food scraps, machine parts, newspapers, bottles, diapers, couches, dead cats and just about anything else end up before the broom of Sayed Ahmed, who has been sweeping streets for 24 years.

"The trash keeps increasing. It's the only thing in Egypt we don't run out of," said Ahmed, in a blue uniform and askew cap, scooping debris into a white sack. "The population keeps growing and there's nowhere to put it. But people are throwing away bread. You should never throw away food."

Behind him, in the street median, a young man and a boy pick through a small hill of garbage, plucking out recyclables and things that can be sold or tinkered into something new. "We take what we can use," said the man, back bent and oblivious to jockeying donkey carts and microbuses.

This city and its suburbs have a population of about 17 million. Villagers arrive daily from the provinces, and scavenged wood and bricks are used to add new hovels to neighborhoods of slums. It's a grid of perpetual motion and compressed space, where legions of hogs kept by the zabaleen once munched away tons of trash a day. Their ranks were culled in 2009 over misplaced fear that the animals carried swine flu.

Front-end loaders scrape garbage from streets and trucks drive it away in Sisyphean ritual. As soon as it's cleared, more materializes, even around villas of the rich. Mothers, children at their elbows, struggle to keep hems unsullied while navigating piles and gliding through errands.

The community of zabaleen ("garbage", in Arabic) live in Cairo's Moqattam Hills. Their main source of employment is the collection and recycling of rubbish, which they do with impressive methodicalness and frugality.

Plastic bottles are assorted by colour, and along with other plastic materials and aluminium get chopped up into little pieces and re-used to make hangers, containers and other products, or sold to China (in fact, 90% of their products are used as raw material for factories in China, locals said).

It begs the question why donors don't give the local community money to build factories that can be used for product-making in Egypt. My local guide wondered this too.

Organic waste, which includes discarded food, cow dung among other natural waste, is also used to make compost, which is sold, and bio-gas, which provides a small number of the local community with the fuel to do things like heat a stove and make tea.

But their frugality comes by necessity. The zabaleen, a Christian community, live in extreme poverty.

Women and children sit amongst the dirt, mothers sort through rubbish while children use cardboard boxes to play. Men sit amidst plastic with so many flies around you can hear them buzzing in the air. And the stench of rotting food. Animals - chickens, dogs, and a caged monkey -- look unsurprisingly dirty, dehydrated and malnourished.

Nevertheless, everyone greeted us with a smile. Kids said "hello" and "what's your name" proudly to show off the bit of English they've learned.

In a community of 75,000 people, there's only one hospital (set up by a French nun) and three schools (two government-owned and one privately-owned).   

Me and my friend Lucy visited two non-governmental associations: the Association for the Protection of the Environment (APE) and Solar Cities. The first seems to do good work with employing about 400 people to recycle paper, cloths and other materials that they then use to produce pretty paper-products like bookmarks, cards, notebooks, pictures, patchwork bed-covers, wall-hangings, rugs and other goods. They also have health and education programs.

The girl in the photograph works from 8am to 3pm and it takes her a whole working day to produce one carpet. 

The second, a bio-gas and solar water heating company, does good work but has little support from the Egyptian government to provide the local community with alternative energy and stretched sources of finance since the revolution.

Our guide and a saleswoman at the APE complained that since the revolution local businesses have suffered: people have stopped buying, donors have stopped giving, companies have stopped creating new employment opportunities and the lack of safety at ports have meant exporting has become difficult.

Hence, presidential candidate Ahmed Shafiq, who represents the old regime, appears to be popular in the neighbourhood. Many want a return of the past, our guide said, so that their businesses could get going again. This is topped with a deep-seated hatred of Islamists.

A really good documentary to watch about the zabaleen is Garbage Dreams: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xlfj9y_garbage-dreams_news.

Not only does it humanise the issue as you get to follow more closely the lives of young boys, who work as garbage collectors, but also highlights the unjust issue of foreign contractors hired by the government for garbage collection, instead of the local zabaleen community.

It gave me an idea that in order to proactively help the community I could collect my plastic waste and at the end of every month take it over to the zabaleen for their benefit rather than it going to a foreign contractor.

By Engi Wassef.