Amid Heaps of Refuse, Cleanup Effort Stalls in Cairo Trash-Sorters’ Slum

Donkey carts piled high with trash creak through muddy intersections in the Rubbish Collectors’ Quarter, parting the flies that swarm just above the pungent muck.

More garbage towers from the beds of old blue pickup trucks, shifting and tilting at each bounce along pitted stretches of road baked hard by the sun. Spills appear of minor concern; it all ends up on the neighborhood’s streets anyway.

The 25,000 residents of Hayy al-Zabbaleen--the quarter’s name in Arabic--gather and sort 3,000 tons of trash a day, more than a third of what Cairo’s households discard. The rest is picked up by municipal garbage collectors and smaller zabbaleen communities.

Despite the filth, the people of Hayy al-Zabbaleen say this is home, and they are resisting government attempts to clean up the district, fearing their livelihoods will be lost.

Theirs is a huge job in a city of 16 million people known nearly as much for its garbage as for its old Islamic sites that draw tourists from around the world. It’s also a smelly, tedious, unhealthy job that pays at best 10 Egyptian pounds--about $3--a day.

The city wants to tear down some rundown cement-and-brick buildings and move the trash-sorting work 20 miles away while keeping the zabbaleen homes here.

The cleanup plan is sorely needed, said Dr. Jamal Ibrahim, who works at a government-run clinic in Hayy al-Zabbaleen.

He and four other doctors see about 120 patients a day from the quarter and nearby slums, many displaying symptoms of environment-related illnesses--chest infections, diarrhea and communicable skin diseases. The doctors provide little more than advice because the clinic lacks antibiotics and few residents can afford $6 to fill a prescription.

So when a mother brings in her sick baby, “I can’t tell her anything but that the baby must be kept clean,” Ibrahim said. That, he acknowledges, is impossible.

“This is a polluted place, and the diseases are going to be here unless they clean it all,” the doctor said.

Many parents, however, say their children are reasonably healthy despite living, playing and working in garbage. They fear their community will be torn apart by the government plan. Working mothers would be faced with caring for small children in a far-off place without household facilities. Older children would be far from their after-school job of helping their families.

“We live very simply, and we depend on what we get,” said Atef Geyarga, 27, who was born in the area and earns about $2 a day flattening and bundling cardboard boxes. “Without this, we cannot eat. It is our job.”

Mounir Nawar, vice president of the Zabbaleen Assn., said the government wants families to sign pledges essentially prohibiting them from building homes on the distant land allotted for their work.

“The whole household works. What will the people do?” he asked. “How do the officials not understand this?”

The Cairo governor’s office declined to discuss the issue. It had planned to start relocating the trash work earlier this year, but held back after the residents objected.

Though the cleanup plan is on hold, some opponents have suggested that talk about building city recycling and composting factories amounts to a threat to put the zabbaleen out of business if they do not cooperate.

Trash, like the flies and rats, is unavoidable, but it helps support what makes the Hayy al-Zabbaleen like any other neighborhood: teahouses, shops, fruit stands and giggling schoolgirls walking home arm in arm.

The zabbaleen start their day collecting trash. Once in Hayy al-Zabbaleen, hair-rinse containers, vegetable peels, shattered bottles and cracked buckets--along with various unrecognizable solids and sludges--are picked through by hand and with goats.

Animals eat what’s edible. Glass, metals, plastics and paper are separated to be sold to recyclers. Those items are carried into storage rooms, piled on rooftops and in doorways or bagged and stacked until they’re barely a dented tomato-sauce can shy of the freshly washed sheets and towels hung out to dry from second-story windows.

What cannot be recycled or digested is buried or incinerated. But the zabbaleen ensure that the truly useless is only a fraction of what is discarded, since they must pay about $9 for each truckload sent for incineration.

At 20, Nabil Nowruz already has 10 years’ experience snipping the ends off cans, slicing them lengthwise and flattening them. His father, Nowruz Saad, said he would like better for his 12 children, but little else is available: “People like to live here, but there are no [other] jobs here, so what can they do?”

Resignation to what is viewed as inflexible fate takes nothing away from the pride many residents express in their work. “We feel we are doing something important,” said Nissim Sawaaris Wubreyaan, a 41-year-old father of six. “We are cleaning the whole of Cairo.”