Home is a hovel built from the city’s rubbish

Hadeel al Shalchi

At first I thought it was a cat rustling in the huge pile of rubbish. The mound of chip bags, plastic bottles, car parts and nappies began to swell and crackle in front of me, and out rolled … a little boy.

About three years old, he sat on the edge of the small mound of garbage, fiddling with a plastic straw and looking up at me with huge, brown eyes as I interviewed his parents.

I was standing in the middle of the Zabaleen quarter of Cairo. One of the infamous neighborhoods, it is home to the Zabaleen, the Cairenes who make a living by collecting the city’s rubbish and recycling it.

Earlier this year, their lives were thrown into turmoil by the fallout from the swine flu pandemic.

The Zabaleen, you see, were also Egypt’s pig farmers. After collecting and separating the rubbish, they fed the perishables to their pigs, which, when fattened, were then sold on for their meat.

I say “were” because Egypt’s government, fearing the rapid spread of swine flu, ordered all the pigs in the city to be culled. Ministry officials swept into the neighbourhood in late summer and executed thousands of pigs – even though the disease is not borne by the animals and no one from the Zabaleen had died of swine flu.

There were promises of compensation for each pig culled, but many of the Zabaleen told me the sum did not compare to their investment in the animals.

By raising the pigs, the Zabaleen provided a service to those who did eat pork in the predominantly Muslim country, while by eating the perishable rubbish the pigs helped to rid neighborhoods of tones of odorous waste that would otherwise accumulate on the streets and offend the sensibilities of those citizens who might think the waste they throw out just evaporates.

But back to the little boy in the rubbish pile.

The Zabaleen don’t really have a particularly sophisticated way of dealing with rubbish. There are no factories or recycling centers where they can clock on and do a decent day’s work.

Basically, they do not just collect the trash, they live among it.

Children born into a Zabaleen family are expected to pick up the trade, they set off early in the morning, spreading out among Cairo’s various neighborhoods, and walk up to the back doors of buildings, collecting piles of rubbish which they bring home to be sorted.

Entering one of the collectors’ homes was an eye-opener. It was virtually made of rubbish. Through the doorway was a typical family scene – a mother, carrying a child on her hip, stirred a pot on a gas stove while around her six small children played and giggled as their father came through to greet us. But the room was dark, stank so badly it made you feel sick, and everyone was filthy but seemed not to notice. Mounds of rubbish acted as seating places for the children as they sorted through the debris.

Close by, in a small workshop, men emptied bags of plastic bottles into a washer-dryer, before chopping them into tiny granules to be recycled into other plastic products, an innovative and environmentally friendly idea. But the workshop doubled as a nursery in the morning, a place where children came to learn their alphabet and play amid the grime.

The squalor of the neighborhood was unbelievable. The rubbish spewed out of the homes and sprawled down the streets, yet people did not seem to notice. They appeared inured to it. They were simply playing the cards that life had dealt them. It was a livelihood, and it was better than begging.

I left feeling appalled. The smell of the neighborhood lingered in my nose for hours. I had visited an area that few Cairenes see, a dirty little secret kept out of sight. When I arrived back at my home, I found it hard to believe that two such different worlds could exist in one city – a city where you can get a massage at the Four Seasons before enjoying dinner at the InterContinental, while 20 minutes away a little boy plays on a mound of filth.




*Published in the UAE's THE NATIONAL on Nov. 7, 2009.