The Best American Travel Writing 2012 (10 page)

Cairenes were also infuriated by the government's decision to charge them for trash collection directly on their utility bills. Suddenly they were paying twice—one payment to the multinationals, and another payment at the door for the people who actually collected the trash: the zabaleen.

 

To learn how multinationals were coping with their dilemma, I make an appointment with Ahmed Nabil, general manager of International Environmental Services (IES), in his glass-and-steel office next to the American embassy. IES won a $6.5 million annual contract to collect waste from Giza, but after six years on the ground the company still pays huge sums in fines for repeatedly failing to empty dumpsters on time. The fines have hobbled IES and prevented them from expanding their fleet or offering more jobs to the city's legions of unemployed. (Nabil would not disclose a figure, but Luigi Pirandello—the Italian manager of another multinational firm called AMA Egypt—told me his company pays 7 percent of its revenue in fines.)

After bemoaning myriad forms of GCBA harassment and waxing nostalgic about his sojourn in Houston as a young engineer, Nabil—wiry, with a thin silver mustache and a raspy smoker's voice—turns to the zabaleen. He sips his double espresso and tamps out his fifth cigarette, folding the filter neatly over the ember and pressing down with his thumb. “Of course the zabaleen are part of the plan,” he says. “From the social point of view, we have a responsibility to keep them working, and from the point of view of experience, they can do what no one else can. The question now is how should they be integrated?”

When the multinationals first arrived, they attempted to hire zabaleen as collectors at about $60 a month, the going rate at the time for manual labor in Cairo. The zabaleen never showed much interest, partly because working for them would be seen as betrayal of the community—like a scab breaking a strike line—but more because the zabaleen recoil at the idea of simple wage labor.

“The zabaleen are business people in their own right,” explained Bertie Shaker, a researcher with CID Consulting, a Copt-owned firm that has advised the government and the multinationals. “They don't want to be beholden to corporate interests, or to turn over the methods and expertise they've spent generations developing in exchange for a wage.”

Executives like Nabil have a strong financial interest in co-opting the zabaleen: illegal dumping by zabaleen is the main source of multinationals' fines. The problem spun out of control after the May 2009 pig cull. For the zabaleen, dumping was partially an instrument of revenge. Mountains of trash shot skyward from vacant lots across the capital, and multinationals took months to get the situation under control.

Nabil hopes to discourage illegal dumping by bringing the assets of his company and the zabaleen in line. By contract, IES must recycle 20 percent of all garbage collected, a mark the company has never met. Nabil thinks the zabaleen could help his company reach the bar, and he plans to scratch their backs in return. He has advocated the construction of a transfer facility the zabaleen could use instead of an illegal dump site to sort recyclables from organic waste. The zabaleen could cart off all the recyclables they could manage, and IES could truck the organic waste left behind to composting facilities, where it could be turned into environmentally safe fertilizer for donation to rural farmers and counted toward IES's recycling percentage.

“If they dump garbage on the street, we incur more expenses to collect it, but if there was a place where they could come and sort in a hygienic plant, they could double or even triple their efficiency,” Nabil says. “To waste their experience is wrong. To use their experience is a win-win situation.”

 

It's just after eight on a May morning, and Moussa and Samaan are preparing for a long day at the shredder with
taamiya
sandwiches and tea at a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop down the street from their house. Today the machine under Moussa's house will eat 1,700 pounds of plastic soda bottles. Baba Shenouda, the Coptic pope, drones from a fuzzy TV mounted in a corner. Moussa puffs on a gurgling waterpipe and hums along to the liturgy. One of the Zikris' friends, a guy named Beshoul, takes it upon himself to introduce me to everyone in the shop. This is so and so, he works with PET plastic, he says, and this is so and so, he works with cardboard. Every zabaleen recycler has a specialty—they are master guildsmen of trash.

Back at the house, Moussa and Samaan hoist open the corrugated iron door to their garage. Sunlight sends rats scurrying into the shadows. We scramble over filthy bags of bottles stacked to the ceiling to get to the back of the garage, where the shredder is plugged into a high-voltage socket. Wedged into a corner, we're completely walled in by a fortress of 8-foot-tall bags stuffed with bottles. All that plastic does little to dampen the agonizing whine of the circular grinder Samaan uses to sharpen the shredder blades. I put on my sunglasses to protect my eyes from the bursting sparks, but Samaan just squints scornfully and keeps grinding.

The men work with astonishing speed. Their shredder consumes each giant bag of bottles in about five minutes, and little by little the magic machine chews its way out of the hole. Like Rumpelstiltskin spinning a heap of straw into gold, these men are turning worthless bottles into cash. After a while the machine gets hot and begins to put off bitter fumes, a mix of diesel exhaust and vaporized plastic. There's no ventilation except for the open garage door. Moussa tries to hide his running eyes from the smoke rising from the mouth of the machine. Veins bulge from his thin arms as he plunges bottles into the blades with a giant Aquafina jug. Samaan fills the hopper and shovels the growing pile of chips. He hangs empty bags by a nail driven through an icon of the Virgin Mary.

At some point Samaan passes me cotton balls to stuff in my ears, but the damage is done. For the rest of the day I feel like I'm underwater. We take a break at noon and head to the coffee shop for a smoke. We wade through a 2-foot layer of 7-Up and Sprite bottles to get out of the garage—it feels and sounds exactly like wading through the balls at a McDonald's PlayPlace. We stop to say hello to Moussa's mother and father, who are squatting in a garage across the street, sorting plastic shopping bags into color-segregated bins. A donkey is tethered to a post next to where they're sitting, and chickens are pecking at the dusty floor.

Three giggling boys pile around the table where Moussa and I are sitting at the coffee shop. Their names are Samaan, Abanoub, and Gergis—names as common to Copts as Mohammed, Ahmed, and Mustapha are to Muslims. Moussa arm-wrestles with the boys, who clearly admire him. He's a hotshot among the younger generation of zabaleen, with his microloan and his progress in the Recycling School, a nonprofit established to reach out to zabaleen kids left behind by the formal education system.

Samaan sits alone in a corner of the coffee shop, scowling. His relationship with Moussa is frayed, but I haven't found out why. We pay and go back to Moussa's house, where his sister-in-law has prepared a lunch of chicken and stewed tomatoes. We pick hunks of meat off the chicken with pieces of flatbread. Moussa and Samaan don't speak a word to each other, but Moussa's sister-in-law is more relaxed today, now that Abanoub's infection has passed. She sits with us and laughs at my Palestinian-accented Arabic. Samaan, suddenly in a foul temper, sucks the joy from the room. He snarls at the kids whenever they stray too close.

 

After lunch Moussa takes me to visit his English tutor, a thirty-two-year-old bachelor named Rizeq Youssef. We find him at a table on the street in front of his grandmother's house at the edge of the Garbage City, where the zabaleen's realm butts up against the vast Muslim slums. We wait for Riz, as Moussa calls him, to wrap up a business deal on his mobile. Riz runs a bustling PET-chip exporting business—PET is the variety of plastic used to make soda bottles—and the café next to his grandmother's place is the closest thing he has to an office.

As we wait, Riz's workers unload grain sacks full of unwashed green plastic chips from a truck. Each sack weighs about 80 pounds, and there must be thirty of them. Riz has just purchased the chips from a shredder, and now his workers will wash the chips in a series of vats to remove debris and remnants of labels. Then they'll dry the chips in the sun and repackage them for shipment to China.

Riz is tall with graying hair, a mustache, and a pocked, chubby face. He got into the PET business about ten years ago, and he's got his operation down to a science. He exports one ton of chips to China for a total cost of about $515, including labor and shipping expenses. He exports 40 to 60 tons of PET each month to Chinese importers, who resell the chips to textile manufacturers at a 20 percent markup. Riz splits the profit with the importers. The real value enters when Chinese manufacturers turn the chips into polyester, which eventually makes its way to American shopping malls in the form of tracksuits and sneakers.

Riz's business only works on an economy of scale. He buys chips from dozens of shredders, including Moussa, and deals in huge volumes. He employs seven men and runs his washing workshop six days a week. “I'm happy if I make fifty dollars per ton,” he says. At $50 a ton and 60 tons a month, Riz earns about $36,000 a year. Hardly a king's ransom, but he has ambitions. He's saving to buy a machine that will help him increase his output to 15 tons daily, putting him into serious cash.

Riz considers himself extremely lucky. His father was a science teacher at a government school who went out on a garbage collection route on the weekends, and his mother worked as a garbage sorter. His parents scrimped to send him to the private Gabbal Moqattam School, founded in 1981 by a Belgian nun named Sister Emanuelle. There were no schools at all in the Garbage City prior to the opening of Gabbal Moqattam, and Riz was one of the first enrolled students. Today he is one of the school's most celebrated graduates.

Riz went on to get a university teaching degree and become a teacher, “but I was always working both jobs,” he said, and “my business was suffering. I like teaching, but I think my mind is more suited to business.” Still, Riz can't shake a sense of community obligation, so he spends his free time outside his grandmother's house writing down English vocabulary for neighborhood kids and coaching them through their homework. As we talk, Moussa plucks words out of our conversation and scrawls them out in shaky English letters in his notebook. Riz pauses occasionally to correct him.

Moussa listens with wonderment as Riz rattles off calculations: so many tons of chips from the shredders equals so much profit from China. If Moussa keeps working and studying, he could develop a business like Riz's someday. As we walk back from Riz's in the dwindling sunlight of early evening, however, Moussa grows sullen. I quickly understand why. When we arrive at his street, Samaan comes flying out of the coffee shop in a rage.

“Where were you!” he screams. “I've been calling you all afternoon!”

Moussa had taken off after lunch to visit Riz and left Samaan alone to contend with the sea of green bottles.

“My battery died! Besides, I told you I had a lesson today,” Moussa growls. Samaan throws up his hands and storms off. Moussa and I keep walking toward the highway, where I'll catch a taxi home.

“Sometimes when I'm alone,” he says, “I write my whole life down. I ask myself, what can I do with my life? Can I live outside? Maybe I can leave Egypt. I am tired of this life. I am tired of carrying my whole family.”

He mumbles something.

“What did you say?” I ask.

“Ar-rab yesouah aarib min i-khaifeen.”

The Lord Jesus is close to the afraid.

 

Ezzat Naem has come a long way since his childhood years, when he spent his days sorting garbage with his parents. Now he's director of the Spirit of Youth Association, which oversees the Recycling School for Boys. “Children's education is the first thing to go during economic hardships,” Ezzat told me. A successful girls' school program founded by the Association for the Protection of the Environment in the 1980s, centered on crafts projects and literacy, paved the way for the Recycling School, which now has a hundred and fifty boys enrolled.

Moussa is the equivalent of an eighth-grader at the Recycling School, which focuses on literacy and arithmetic while striving to harness students' entrepreneurial zeal. There is no telling how sophisticated young zabaleen could become with strong foundations in mathematics and market analysis. Like most boys of his generation, Moussa never received any formal education before starting at the Recycling School at age sixteen. Government schools in Manshiet Nasser average sixty students per classroom, and the overcrowding deprives students of individual attention. Parents pay for after-school private lessons in order for their kids to pass yearly exams. But lessons cost nearly $200 per year, and zabaleen kids are also sorely missed during the workday, when they care for siblings and help process garbage.

In order to convince parents to send their kids to school, teachers had to show that students could still contribute to family income. Students at the APE girls' school received a dollar per day for the weaving work they did between lessons, and upon graduation they received a loom in their home and free rug-making material. The school would then buy the girls' woven products and sell them to wealthy Egyptians. The girls' school is now in its thirtieth year, and the Recycling School hopes to emulate its success.

About half of the boys enrolled at the Recycling School earn money by gathering, weighing, and destroying shampoo and conditioner bottles. Procter & Gamble funds the school as part of its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) regimen, but also because it was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to counterfeiters, who used to buy stockpiles of bottles, refill them, then sell them on the street. Since the Recycling School opened in 2004, its boys have destroyed 250,000 bottles.