CAIRO: All day in Cairo, local Egyptians are methodically gathering rubbish by hand from bins, alleys and streets, and filling large satchels with the garbage, which they carry away on their backs. These people are called the zabaleen in Egyptian Arabic, meaning ‘garbage people’. The zabaleen all but blend in among the denizens, tourists and researchers of bustling Cairo—you could easily miss them. Yet, they administer an essential public service by collecting, disposing of, and recycling the immense amounts of garbage that accumulate in this city of an estimated twelve to fifteen million people.

They work in teams. They spend long days collecting refuse from the many districts of sprawling Cairo, which they take back to their homes to sort through by hand for recyclables. It’s hard, dirty and putrefied work.

The zabaleen, almost exclusively members of Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority, live in a neighborhood of the Cairo called Manshiyet Nasr, often referred to as Garbage City. The area was designated in the late 1960s to consolidate zabaleen neighborhood. Today’s population estimates place about 30,000 persons living in Garbage City.

Garbage City is situated near the Citadel and hidden from view in the Mokattam escarpment. A monastery, dedicated to St. Simon the Tanner, is hidden in the caves here, and tour busses drive up the escarpment road to that monastery, with the zabaleen pickup trucks stacked impossibly high with bales of recyclable materials. These two very different worlds existing next to each other is a distinctive characteristic of Cairene society: modernity and wealth saddled with poverty.

A walking tour through Cairo’s Garbage City proves itself an intensely educational experience. Garbage is hauled back to this city, and sorted through by hand for recyclables. Men, women and children take part in this task. One can see piles of glass, plastics and metals—all sorted by color and designation—and simply by peering into open rooms from the streets.

Young men operate belt-driven shredding machinery, rendering plastics and sundries into tattered fragments—the shredding machines making exerted high-pitched shrieks as the materials are fed into them, then rent asunder. Young girls, next to their mothers, pick through household refuge, tossing empty tuna fish cans into a pile in the corner. Stacks of electronic equipment fill rooms: computer screens, televisions, adding machines. Each block seems to specialize in a particular area of discarded durable goods.

And though this neighborhood is often referred to as a slum, the standard of living here is visibly higher than many other poor Cairo neighborhoods. There is ongoing construction of new apartments, and many balconies were freshly painted in bright, lively pastels and with decorative pottery on display. The presence of a post office indicates this neighborhood is officially recognized by the government, not something all neighborhoods in Cairo can claim. There is money to be made in this decidedly unglamorous work.

But there are other perspectives on the machinations of this neighborhood, aside from relative prosperity and environmentally conscious industry. The zabaleen were understandably suspicious and guarded as I wandered through Garbage City, perhaps well familiar with the reactions of foreigners seeing their houses filled with discarded waste.

The only school I saw, a grammar school, did not have murals of teddy bears and alphabets; it instead had murals of trash collection, and I was told they don’t teach grammar and maths—they only teach which items to separate and collect from rubbish bins. The children here are born into an almost inescapable caste.

Aside from the long hours required to manually collect the garbage, haul it back home, separate it, bundle it and take to the appropriate recycling center for money, there are health issues involved with this occupation: exposure to hepatitis, infection and bacteria. Cairo’s pig population (350,000 animals) was recently culled in hysterical reaction to the Swine Flu virus—Cairo had not been prepared for the Bird Flu, and was criticized for a casual response. But the pigs were not infected with the H1N1 virus, and the pigs used to eat tonnes of the organic waste—only now the waste is accumulating inside Garbage City. Dead rats were conspicuous in the alleys, and local clinics are reporting a surge in rat bites among the zabaleen.

The pig cull, which is considered a slight to the Coptic Christian minority by a Muslim majority parliament, also had financial implications, as many zabaleen supplemented their income by selling the pork—the meat, considered a primary source of protein in the local diet is now gone altogether. Malnutrition and anemia rates are expected to spike in Garbage City.

The future of Cairo’s zabaleen remains uncertain. There is talk of acquiring modern European recycling machinery and waste disposal methods to replace the current system of sorting through rubbish by hand. But adaptation is a more common a trait of the zabaleen than planning and implementing policy.

** Pete Willows, a Canadian freelance writer, has lived and worked in Egypt, The United States, New Zealand, the Sudan and Canada.

BM