We visited Cairo’s “garbage city.” It is a scene I will never forget…

On our last full day in Cairo, six students and I went to a city within a city called the Zabaleen. Home to somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 people, it’s a community of Coptic Christians – about 10 percent of Egypt is Christian – whose sole function is to collect garbage around Cairo, sort it, and sell it to make money to live. Everything other than what the animals eat is repackaged and recycled. Almost nothing goes to waste.

Like in any city, Zabaleen has main corridors, and side streets, where people live. This is one of those.

We weren’t supposed to be in Zabaleen because the government didn’t want us to see what was there. Zabaleen is where all the hogs lived that were slaughtered last month as part of Egypt’s frenzied attempt to thwart an outbreak of swine flu. The people of Zabaleen keep the hogs among them – on the streets, on their roofs, in their homes even, to eat the organic waste they collect. The hogs are critical to their production. So when the government came in for the slaughter, the people fought back. The military sprayed them with rubber bullets, and they had to retreat. These people have almost nothing – and certainly, they are not armed. From what we understand, the hogs were taken by dump trucks out of Zabaleen and piled into huge ditches, where chemicals were poured over them so they would die.

The plan to get in had been to visit Zabaleen a few days earlier, while the rest of the group was headed to a nearby cave church carved into a mountain. But I thought better of it. The police were watching us, and would have known if we broke off, in a van, from the group. So, I asked Abduh if he could take four of us in his car, and hire a taxi to take the rest.

He agreed, with the caveat that we would pull out if anything seemed amiss. So, on Thursday morning, Denis loaded the group, minus our six, into two vans headed for a different part of the city. Abduh told three of our team to walk around the corner of the hotel and hail a cab. Abduh and I followed with three others in his car.

The tenements don't have doors, or screens. Trash is heaped on the roofs. It spills out of the first floors.

What I saw there, I will never forget. The streets were lined with shoddily-built tenements. People lived on the top floors. And on the first floors – all open and viewable through massive, gaping holes without doors – were mountains of trash. People of all ages, including children and elders, were sitting in it, sorting with their hands what others had discarded the day before. There were flies everywhere, and though the hogs were gone, dogs and cats ran in and out, grabbing what they could of the scraps.

I could not speak. I think Abduh thought I was sick to my stomach, but that wasn’t it. It was all those kids running around. Some were playing on the piles, some were sorting through trash bags as tall as they. There was a school inside the community, but no one was attending it. There was a church there, but no hospital. There were some carts with food to buy, but everything was speckled black – covered with flies.

At some point, Abduh made the mistake of walking near an officer who was stationed near a far wall of Zabaleen. Abduh was questioned about who I was. Minutes later, his phone rang. It was the tourism police. Where were we? Why weren’t we with the rest of the group? I quickly gathered up the rest of the students and we raced down a dusty road, out of Zabaleen.

I have returned to that place many times in my mind’s eye since we left. But I’ve waited this long to write about it because I don’t yet know what to say. Three sets of students are working on stories about it. Another is planning a photo essay. That’s what journalists are supposed to do, and that’s why we went. So, mission accomplished, I guess. But what else are we supposed to do with this information? I don’t know yet. It’s just that throwing a few words on a page doesn’t seem like enough.

Children roam around the streets. It was 11 a.m. here, but no one was in school.

A boy sits next one of the sorted piles from that morning.

Other boys start work on newly delivered bags.

A heap of trash, pre-sorted.

 

Caitlin, one of the students on our team, snapped this photo. Behind me is the main street that cuts through the heart of Zabaleen.