Garbage City, Cairo, Egypt
From the back seat of our blacked out SUV, I feel separated from what I am seeing. An unwelcome voyeur, maybe. Still, I want to know the other sides of Egypt. The parts that keep it breathing. Navigating the narrow alleyways of these once abandoned buildings, we pass a partially opened doorway. Inside, a woman and child sort through a mountain of trash. Behind the woman, a rusted sink and a tattered mattress. A pickup truck rumbles toward us, with tied stacks of trash swaying side to side, threatening to topple us as we pass. On our left, a meat shop. Pig carcasses hang in the street; flies swarm in the desert heat. Children with backpacks chase alongside our car. They look happy to me.
This is Manshiyat Nasser - Garbage City. Over 270,000 Egyptians call this place home. Its inhabitants are called the Zabbaleen or “garbage people". Nearly every floor of every building in this city is piled high with trash, and the Zabbaleen live among it.
Our driver explains that Cairo lacks an official garbage collection system, and that the Zabbaleen have been independently cleaning up the city's trash for the past 70 years. The entire city is built on revenues earned from recycling and the re-sale of refurbished goods. Tucked within these buildings are schools and hospitals. Candy shops and pharmacies. There was a method to the madness, even if we couldn't see it.
I tie up my hair and cover my shoulders as we walk away from the parked car - sandwiched between our driver and nervous-looking guide. The smell seems to waft up from the alley, growing stronger with each step. A toddler wanders barefoot into the street. Music plays softly overhead, something Arabic and beautiful. A man turns the corner and walks by with red balloons in one hand and a bouquet of cotton candy in the other. He shouts up at the brick buildings, repeating the same thing again and again as he wanders down the street.
The air smells of diesel. Trash. Sweat. We walk a little further and enter a shop run by a woman. Everything for sale is made from recycled trash, each piece collected from the streets and waterways of Cairo. We buy a few things from her and continue walking, toward an alleyway bustling with life. I can't help but smile as I look at my friends, each of us smiling with looks of awe and wonder. Driving through and observing from behind the glass pane of a moving vehicle - it just isn't the same.
We walk along the alley, back toward the Cave Church. Our guide leads us up a broken concrete stairwell to an exposed rooftop, where we look out onto the city of Manshiyat Nasser. Goats and pigs graze on the distance rooftops, stepping around satellite dishes and tattered couches. A man climbs onto a wooden platform that has been built like scaffolding on the concrete slabs of a hallowed out building. A flock of white birds fly by. This too, is Egypt.
