The Best American Travel Writing 2012 (11 page)

I visited Moussa at school one day and found him sitting at a low table with two students about his age and two little boys who were about twelve. The walls were painted in exuberant purples and pinks and the ceilings were strung with shampoo bottle craftwork. The room had the feel of a kindergarten, and a fair number of the boys in the room looked about kindergarten age. They were the lucky ones, to have such an early jump on education.

Moussa was taking down dictation in Arabic from a young female teacher. At another table, little boys worked math problems with an abacus. Moussa didn't seem worried that his classmates were less than half his age. He lives and breathes the Recycling School. He is studying hard for an exam that will allow him to matriculate to high school, and he would probably live at the school if they'd let him.

“Moussa can make it if he believes in himself,” said Ezzat Naem, another one of Moussa's heroes. It was Ezzat and the staff of the Recycling School who helped arrange Moussa's microloan. “He snatches at opportunities. He's hungry for chances and willing to work hard. If he is ambitious enough, he can do anything.”

 

Mariam Abdel Malik must have been expecting me to arrive at the Ministry of Planning with an entire television crew. She had a dozen plates of cookies set out on the giant conference table, and I think she was disappointed when she realized I had come alone. I had come to the Ministry of Planning to glean their plans for the future of the Garbage Village and the rest of Manshiet Nasser, and Mariam was going to be my guide.

There is a lot of anxiety in the Garbage City about the possibility of a forthcoming eviction, and a lot of historical evidence to suggest it might happen.

Ezzat Naem singled out real estate developers—not multinational waste management firms—as the greatest threat to the zabaleen community. He fears the government will force the zabaleen from Garbage City just like they were forced out of Imbaba forty years ago. They survived the previous eviction, but it's different now. Back then zabaleen lived in shacks and owned only the clothes on their backs and their pigs. Now they live in a city they're proud of, that they've built with their own hands and the sweat and ingenuity of generations. “The house is the primary investment and the primary site of business,” Ezzat told me. “You can't do this work from an apartment. It just doesn't work. Families need their garages to store materials and to keep their machines.”

I keep Ezzat's anxiety in mind as Mariam, a middle-class Egyptian who happens to be Christian, leads me through a PowerPoint on the Greater Cairo 2050 Master Plan. “Seventy-five percent of the population of Cairo lives within a twenty-kilometer diameter,” she tells me. “The population density is extreme, and the purpose of the plan is to decentralize Cairo to reduce population density.”

Illustrations flit across the screen of a place that looks like Orlando, not the traffic-choked, polluted mess outside the ministry's doors. Leafy trees line wide boulevards devoid of people and cars, and aerial sketches show swaths of jungle canopy over much of the city's slums. The few cars there are conspicuously observe the limits of their lanes—the surest sign that these images are from a fantasy Egypt.

When Mariam comes to a slide of a giraffe bending down to lick an ice cream cone held out by a blond woman in a sports car in the middle of the desert, a ministry employee named Nahed deadpans, “Now this is the future.”

“Yes, this is too much,” Mariam laughs.

I ask Mariam to return to a slide diagramming Cairo's residential areas according to three status labels: planned, unsafe, and unplanned. Part of the Master Plan, as Mariam explained, is to relocate everyone living in unsafe and unplanned areas to new satellite cities in the desert. The government will demolish the slums—including large portions of the historic City of the Dead, where an estimated 25,000 squatters have turned tombs into homes—and attempt to bring back the expansive green spaces that existed in Cairo's Nile watershed just twenty years ago.

“We will build new apartments in unpopulated areas for the people in unsafe areas who are to be relocated,” she says. Unsafe areas include areas under power lines, areas where access streets are not wide enough to permit emergency vehicles, flood-prone areas, and areas under cliffs. Those conditions describe almost all of Cairo's most crowded downtown neighborhoods, as well as large areas of Giza, including the slums that abut the Great Pyramids.

The entire Moqattam area is unsafe in at least two of those categories—it's on the cliffs, and its tiny alleys would be all but impossible for an ambulance driver to navigate. I was on hand two years ago when a rockslide in the Duweiqa neighborhood next to the Garbage City killed over a hundred people. In this instance, the rockslide happened at a place that was easy for ambulances and fire trucks to access, but it didn't matter. It took days for the Egyptian rescue services to finally admit that they had no idea how to break apart the giant boulders to unearth those buried beneath. The most tragic aspect of the disaster was that the government had finished construction several years before on hundreds of new apartments for families living under and above the Duweiqa cliffs, but had never distributed them. Rumors surfaced after the rockslide that the bureaucrat in charge of placing at-risk families in the new apartments sold them to his friends instead.

As Mariam tells me about the relocation plans and shows me mockups of the Disneyesque Future World the government will build for Cairo's poor, I think of the giant boulders on top of crushed Duweiqa homes and the lines of riot police. Not in another forty or a hundred years could I imagine a relocation project on the scale Mariam is describing. If the government won't invest in proper schools and hospitals for the poor, why would it hand them the keys to a new city?

I inquire directly about the ministry's plans for Manshiet Nasser. “Unsafe areas will be
khalas,
” Mariam says, wiping off an imaginary slate. “They will have a choice between an apartment or money.”

“So there will be no people living here in 2050?” I ask, pointing to the Garbage City on the map.

“No.”

 

If you hang around the Garbage City long enough, you start to think that things aren't so bad. You give up trying to keep your shoes clean and you stop worrying about where you sit or the fact that no matter how many times you clean your fingernails, they're always lined with black. After a while you don't think about it when you shake someone's hand who has just had their arm elbow-deep in trash. You leave your Purell at home.

And if you listen to the older zabaleen, you start to think the younger generation has it pretty good. A stout, perpetually smiling mother of five who went by the name Um Michael told me, “When I was a kid there were no schools. There were not even any houses! We used to live in wood and tin one-level shacks right next to the pigs. We even used to go to the bathroom in the pigsty.” Um Michael was born in 1968 in Imbaba. She said life has gotten much easier for women in particular. “Twenty years ago we couldn't even leave the house!” she said.

The zabaleen are Christians, but they're still rural Egyptians and cling to the same conservative social practices as their Muslim counterparts; until this century, female circumcision was widespread in the Garbage City (it has nearly been eliminated thanks to NGO activism), and widespread adherence to traditional Egyptian codes regarding the protection of feminine virtue—observed by Muslims and Christians—prevented women from working outside the home in any capacity.

After puberty, women's lives were restricted almost exclusively to domestic work and child-rearing. “There was no education at all for girls,” Um Michael said. Now forty-two, she is taking literacy classes at Saint Simon and has attained an eighth-grade reading level. She is immensely proud. In a living room scrawled with biblical graffiti, she fed me watermelon and pungent aged cheese that masked the smell of the streets outside. “I'm sorry the house is so dirty,” she said. “It's not usually like this, but I've been studying so hard I haven't had time to clean.”

Marianne Marzouk, Um Michael's oldest daughter, lives a life that Um Michael never could've imagined as a young woman. Marianne has a university degree, speaks English, and recently got a loan to start her own business. It'll just be a small clothing shop underneath her house, but her decision to quit her pharmacy job and strike out on her own shows that entrepreneurial spirit is not limited to zabaleen men alone. It's also notable that Marianne, at twenty-two, is not already married with children; young men and women from the zabaleen community are waiting longer to marry and having fewer kids, allowing them to pursue their work and educational interests with greater freedom.

Many younger zabaleen have visited relatives in their ancestral farming villages, and they are happy to leave the clean air and green vistas behind to return to the Garbage City. “I went with my father once to Assiut,” Moussa told me. “There was nothing to do, and I asked my father if I could come home early. I hated it!” Naema came north to be married as a teenager and has never looked back. “In the village the men work all day under the burning sun for two dollars. They don't own the land and there is no opportunity,” she explained. “Here the men can work as much or as little as they please. The amount of money they make depends on how hard they work.”

In so many ways, a brighter future has already arrived for the zabaleen. They have achieved most of the improvements in their community through their own cooperative labor and ingenuity. All they ask now is for the freedom to continue improving their community at their own pace without government interference in the form of aggressive regulations or, in the worst case, forced relocation.

 

I was surprised to learn that Ezzat supports Ahmed Nabil's idea for transfer facilities where zabaleen can turn over organic waste to the multinationals and sort their recyclables outside the Garbage City. “If we can convince the government that we are the experts with garbage and recycling, and they help us upgrade our systems and our technology, then our living conditions will improve immensely,” he said. Rizeq Youssef said he is already planning to move his washing operation out of the Garbage Village once the government makes industrial land available. “There are many people looking to buy land,” Rizeq said. “I'm trying to invest in land too, because I need space to make my business bigger.”

Dr. Atwa Hussein, a soft-spoken Ministry of Environment employee with olive-green eyes and a neat desk, does not conform to my idea of a scheming bureaucrat. In his office near Cairo's old city, he told me that the government has plans to construct two sorting facilities in the desert surrounding Cairo exactly like the one Ahmed Nabil described. “The biggest problem from the Ministry of Environment's point of view is informal dumping and the accumulation of garbage,” he said. Informal dumps are more than eyesores—they catch on fire and pose a serious threat to adjacent areas, and they also exude methane and pollute the water table. Informal dumps are also factories for disease, especially when located close to overpopulated megacities like Cairo.

Dr. Hussein admitted that the government rushed into reckless contracts with the multinationals in 2003, and that new contracts should account for the zabaleen, who Dr. Hussein sees as Cairo's most important waste management asset. His office is reworking waste management contracts to shift to a service-by-ton model—a shift they believe will lead to a cleaner Cairo and a more productive relationship between the government, the multinationals, and the zabaleen. “Service by route and pickup times does not incentivize the companies,” he explained. “A service-by-ton model will mean that companies will get paid to work as much as they can.” As for the zabaleen, “In the new contracts we will make it possible for the zabaleen to work officially as subcontractors for the multinationals. They will get paid a rate per ton of garbage they take to the sorting facility multiplied by the kilometers driven from the pickup point to the facility.”

Zabaleen collectors with whom I spoke said multinationals already allow them to dump organic waste in their trucks at night, and some even said the multinationals pay the wahaya to organize transfers. Where many parties see a hopelessly complex set of competing interests, Dr. Hussein sees an opportunity to expand and improve a system that's already working. “In a perfect system,” he said, “zabaleen will be formally licensed as the owners of their recycling businesses. In such a system, they could make even more money.” Of course the government will benefit too. Dr. Hussein hopes the eradication of illegal dumping and the transition to environmental landfills will reduce future cleanup costs related to soil and water contamination.

Unlike the Ministry of Planning's PowerPoint, Dr. Hussein's plans are rational and plausible—especially because most of the cooperation he describes is already happening. The cooperation between multinationals and zabaleen just needs to be formalized to achieve maximum efficiency and to promise that the zabaleen get a fair cut.

While I was in Cairo, the Spirit of Youth Association was working with a Gates Foundation grant to explore possibilities for the zabaleen to integrate with the formal waste management sector. The organization surveyed eight hundred garbage collectors to ask if they wanted to be licensed, and the overwhelming response was yes. For all the zabaleen have been able to build out of trash, they've never been able to achieve real security. Formalization would legally sanction their operations and protect them from exploitation.

On the downside, formalizing the zabaleen and moving recycling workshops out of the Garbage City might erode the sturdy village culture that has allowed the community to thrive. In the Garbage City, the family is the best guarantee of security one can hope for; people still pay into collective pots to help friends get married or to handle medical emergencies, marriages are still arranged the old-fashioned way, and children take care of their parents as they grow old. An incredibly complex web of business relationships exists in the Garbage City, but family relationships are the anchors of existence. The zabaleen have always been more like farmers who barter and trade at the village market than factory workers and owners whose relationships and decisions are based entirely on financial transactions. But large export businesses like Rizeq Youssef's are all the evidence one needs to conclude that things are changing fast. The village is getting bigger, and so are the ambitions of its entrepreneurial youth.