A Trip to Garbage City

whether we live in big cities or country villages or literal dumps, we are all pretty much the same

Friends, it’s the end of the year slog.

My dad would have been 65 on Thursday and the fact that we have to celebrate Christmas without him is sinking in, so I’m feeling a little tender this week. Plus, the pollution is getting almost unbearable in Cairo (as it always does in winter) and I’m not feeling my best as a result. I’m burnt out and in need of a spiritual recharge.

Luckily, I’m traveling over the holidays. I can’t wait to hug my family, and the change of scenery will help me reflect and restore myself. In order to come back fresh in the New Year, I’m going to take the next two Tuesdays off from posting and will be back on January 3.

Because I’ll be gone for the rest of December, today is a twofer: an essay on my trip to Cairo’s Garbage City (below), plus this post I wrote for

Time Travel Kitchen

about how I ate my way through Vienna.

Vienna Christmas Market

I’m excited about the content I have planned for January and beyond, and can’t wait to share it with you. Until then, have a wonderful holiday season full of laughter, light, and loved ones.

See you in 2023,
Sam

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My well-traveled dad used to say that people are the same no matter where you go. I never really bought it. He was struck by humans’ similarities, but I’ve always been struck by the breadth of human experience, so much of which is based on the circumstances of one’s birth.

You could, like me, be born in a wealthy country like the U.S. to educated parents, in turn becoming educated yourself and touring the world at your leisure—or you could be born in a poor country like Egypt to parents who are trash collectors, in turn becoming a trash collector yourself and living in a literal dump filled with refuse that once belonged to people like me, who occasionally come to your neighborhood to gawk at you.

This is what I was pondering as Nick and I drove to Mansheya Nasir—known in English as Garbage City—with Irene, a Coptic Christian guide who had shown us much of Cairo. The neighborhood’s unpaved streets are the narrowest I’ve seen in the city, and our driver wove between red pickup trucks whose beds overflowed with fetid garbage bags. The closeness of the buildings crowded out the sky.

Garbage City is the home of the zabaleen, Cairo’s trash collectors, ninety-five percent of whom are Coptic. The smell of rot there is so overwhelming that I had to stop myself from gagging audibly, even with the car windows closed. Flies coat every exposed surface. Chipped and faded paintings of the Virgin Mary look over the street from exterior walls. Yet in other ways, Garbage City is a neighborhood like any other in Cairo, with bakers who set out hundreds of pieces of baladi bread on wooden cooling racks, men smoking shisha at small roadside cafés, and children buying candy at convenience stores.

The government, having never established a public garbage collection system, relies on the zabaleen to keep Cairo clean. Long ago, they lived in makeshift settlements throughout the city. But wealthier residents didn’t want to live next to piles of garbage, so the zabaleen were kettled into a single neighborhood, from whence the men go out to collect the trash and bring it back to their families to be sorted by hand. Behind every open doorway we passed, elderly women sat in piles of rubbish, organizing it by material and color: green plastic bottles in one pile, clear plastic bottles in a second, green plastic bags in yet another…

It’s hard work, but it can be lucrative—for those at the top, at least. The zabaleen are paid to take garbage away, then they repurpose it into things they can sell, allowing them to profit twice off the same refuse. Per Irene, one ton of trash can fetch 18,000 Egyptian pounds, or about $738 USD, which can go quite far in Cairo. The zabaleen’s wares, things like beads made from old magazines strips and purses woven with the tabs of soda cans, can be found in shops around the city.

What the zabaleen can’t reuse, they burn—contributing to Cairo’s ever-present layer of black smog—but the hand sorting system is allegedly 80% efficient. This is partially thanks to the pigs, who eat any food waste off otherwise recyclable trash. The pigs then become food themselves, butchered and sold to restaurants and hotels around Cairo who cater to tourists and non-Muslims. Irene, our guide, pointed to a skinned pig hanging from a hook outside a dingy shop. “I only eat pork when I’m abroad,” she said.

After a few minutes of driving through Garbage City, many of the faces began to look familiar. “They’re mostly from the same families,” Irene said, and they stay in the neighborhood generation after generation. Few of the zabaleen have cars, and I saw neither a train stop nor the usual flurry of rickety microbuses. Practically speaking, there is no way in or out of Garbage City, aside from the occasional tuk tuk and the trash collection trucks themselves. It was likely, I thought to myself, that many of the people I saw from the car window had been born there and, tied to the land like feudal serfs, had never really left. They were bound day after day to sort through the detritus of richer lives. I hoped, at the very least, they had become immune to the smell.

I didn’t take any photos of Garbage City. That would have required me to get out of the car, exposing myself to the stink and the flies, and it wouldn’t have produced a very pretty result. Moreover, it felt wrong; what we were doing was essentially poverty tourism, and I wanted to avoid gawking, to be as polite as possible in the face of others’ comparative misfortune and to not make them feel as though they existed for my entertainment.

But as we moved on to our next stop, I myself became the attraction.

Our car climbed out of Garbage City’s winding alleys, allowing the sky to peak out again. The rank odor dissipated. We were headed for the Cave Church, a Coptic house of worship built into the limestone rock of the Moqattam Hills. The Cave Church is a site of pilgrimage. Many disabled people claim to have been miraculously healed there, and a room off to the side contains a pile of canes and wheelchairs cast off by those who no longer needed them. Stadium seating—enough to host 20,000—starts at the mouth of the cavern and descends toward an altar, with larger-than-life Bible scenes carved into the stone sides.

Nick and I seemed to be the only foreigners among the throngs of visitors that day, many of whom were rowdy school children that tried to stop us with broken English. “Where you from?” a boy with a low-slung backpack shouted. Nick answered sarcastically with the name of our neighborhood in Cairo, which elicited eruptions of laughter. Groups of girls stepped into my path as I tried to maneuver around the pews, looking at me wide-eyed and asking, “can I take photo?” I’d reply with a whispered “sorry” and shuffle past without making eye contact.

The hassling continued as we walked around the church compound. Children followed us with an uncomfortable closeness, staring at me, in particular, like I was a zoo animal. I knew they meant no harm, yet their gawking unnerved me—so much so that and I felt the urge to get back in the car and leave (or at least to tell my hecklers that they could take a long walk off a short pier).

This hasn’t been my experience anywhere else in Cairo. While people occasionally look at me for a second or two longer than I would consider polite, they mostly leave me alone, and have never made me feel unwelcome. But these children, Irene told me, weren’t from Cairo. They had likely come from villages in Upper Egypt, and weren’t used to the look of foreigns with pale skin and yellow hair in the way that big city dwellers would be.

As dehumanized as I felt by the hounding and the stares, I understood a natural curiosity drove the behavior. The kids simply wanted to know more about what lies beyond their villages, about what sort of people are out there, about what more there is to this world. Can I fault them for that, when that same desire is what brought me to Cairo in the first place? And can I fault them for staring at me at all, when just that morning, I’d been staring at the zabaleen?

With our tour coming to an end, I looked out over Garbage City from the top of hill, where flocks of pigeons hovered over the roofs and a rock sculpture spelled out “LORD.” I imagine the zabaleen didn’t relish being turned into a tourist attraction any more than I did, and all I could hope was that I hadn’t made them as uncomfortable as the children at the Cave Church had made me.

It strikes me, as I write this, that my dad was right: people are, in fact, the same everywhere. Even when our lives bear no resemblance on the surface, the fundamental parts of humans’ lived experiences are consistent. None of us want to be made to feel like outsiders, or novelties, or sources of entertainment. We want to belong. We want to be heard. We want to feel validated.

Perhaps above all, we all want to know there is more to this world than what the circumstances of our birth reveal to us. I hope the children from the Cave Church find what they seek.

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Elsewhere

• I brought this chocolate olive oil snacking cake to a friend’s Christmas party last weekend. It’s vegan, it’s incredibly fudge-y, and it’s easy to whip up. What are your favorite dishes to bring to a holiday potluck? [Smitten Kitchen]

• If you like offbeat destinations, I highly recommend reading along with

  this walk through Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. [Chris Arnade Walks the World]

• Another interesting write-up on a place I—like so many tourists—have passed through, but never really visited: 48 hours in the Maldives’ capital, Malé. [Alex in Wonderland]

Photo of the Week: Zermatt, 2017

Looking back fondly on a trip to Switzerland, as I miss fresh air. See you next year. :)