Garbage City: Part 1

Last weekend we visited Garbage City.

We drove through narrow alleyways lined with trash. The bottoms of buildings were filled with trash in the various stages of recycling. Women were squatting on piles, sorting through massive amounts of garbage by hand. Men and boys drove trucks or donkeys pulling heavy loads of garbage or pull overflowing hand carts.

The Zabbaleen are garbage collectors, but many of them were farmers who came from villages and farms in Upper Egypt after a bad crop season many years ago. When they first came to Cairo, they collected trash in carts drawn by donkeys, until the 1990’s when they began using trucks.

Tons of garbage are collected, sorted, reused, recycled and resold. Each family specializes in a particular recyclable item of garbage, particularly plastics, cloth, paper and cardboard, aluminum, tin, animal bones, and glass. These must be cleaned and broken down to accommodate the buyer. This work is typically done by hand while the more privileged workers have a small machine. 

Consider my average bag of trash: plastic water bottles, egg shells, used Kleenexes, scrapings of dinner, plastic bags, dirty diapers, bits of cardboard. I cram it in, shove it down and tie the top closed, then I set it outside my front door. At some point during the day, a member of our boab family picks it up and carries it down to the rusted trash barrel on the curb. Two days ago we watched the trash truck come by, a narrow, flat bed truck with wooden rails built up the sides. A team of four managed this one: one driver, one man who collected the garbage and threw it in the truck and two who sat in the back on the piles of trash, already beginning the sorting process.

During our visit I saw a depth of poverty I may not even have the capacity to understand. To realize that my most basic “necessities” in life are luxuries to them is very humbling. They live in a world filled with, surrounded by, and completely made of trash. They live among trash, their work involves trash, their money comes from trash, the whole of their life revolves around what I put in my trash can. 

Yet, amid the rubbish, I also saw life. I saw people smiling as they worked in their trash piles. I saw fancy dresses hanging outside of a shop. I saw babies being held by their mother and grandmothers. I saw children playing. I saw friends, heads bent toward each other, chattering away.  

 

Laila R. Iskandar Kamel, in her book Mokattam Garbage Village says this about the Zabbaleen: “… their comprehension of life and the world was formed around an entire labyrinth of kinship ties through which they perceived themselves, their relationships with people, their work and in fact, the whole of life. And from that perspective and the orientation of sharing a common destiny of oppression, the strongest feelings of belonging, solidarity and community sprung.” 

--photo's courtesy of Brian Hebert