Happy St. Patricks Day! I spent it hanging out with the 10% minority christians in Egypt... the Coptics. My friend Julie has ben traveling around Africa for over a year now visiting Islamic countries doing research for a book about western misconceptions of the religion of Islam, and Islamic misconceptions about westerners. We met out in the desert oasis of Siwa and were both hanging out in Cairo at the same time, so she invited me to join her for a tour of Garbage City and Coptic Cairo, with an emphasis on the sustainability of the neighborhood.



To get there a cab is necessary. Cab rides between non english speaking Egyptians (my driver) and non arabic speaking westerners (myself) are always an adventure. Julie was in the same boat, with the benefit of speaking some arabic, but unfortunately still making little progress at finding our destination. I wonder how much of it is the cabbie really not knowing where this place is, and how much of it is driving up the fare for a few extra pounds. I was communicating with Julie using my temperamental Nokia phone that only seemed to work when it liked, which never happened to be when i needed it. It got to the point where I couldn’t call out, but she could call in. She was about five minutes ahead of me and we had her cab driver explain to my cab driver where to go. Again, unfortunately, my cab driver had two hearing aids and any time he held my phone up to his ears there was a deafening (no pun intended) high pitched ring, his earpieces communicated with my outdated phone. He hung up and motioned that he now knew where to go, and soon I found myself at a new up scale residential development on a bluff overlooking the Cairo. This was not Garbage City. We played the phone game again and wound our way down the hill and into a much lower rent district... with garbage everywhere... this looked a bit more right. We continued through the tight streets, with the driver throwing occasional fits and uncontrollably honking his horn, and eventually wound our way up into the monastery of St. Simon the Tanner, where I was meeting Julie and our guide. I engaged in another spirited debate about the cost of the trip and exited the cab. A pickup truck drove by me slowly and a young tattooed Coptic, probably about 25 or so, looked out the window, smiled at me and said ‘I Hate You’ as the car drove off. I stood there thinking, ‘but you don’t even know me?’.

I found Julie and we started with a tour of the Coptic sites, including a massive 15,000 seat amphitheater tucked into the side of a cliff. The zabbaleen, or trash collectors, who live and work in Garbage City, are traditionally Coptic Christians, as they can use pigs to process a lot of the biodegradable waste (where interaction with pigs in the muslim religion is forbidden). So it makes sense that many of the modern Coptic monuments are located in relative proximity to Garbage City. The Coptic Quarter south of the downtown contains all of the historic sites and monuments, while this area, west of the city center, is definitely the more modern center for worship. We got a little history on St. Simon, the patron saint of the monastery and amphitheater, and saw some of the programs in place for the Coptic youth... I wasn’t all that interested in all the religious stuff and looked a lot more forward to seeing Garbage City and it’s impact on Cairo’s waste infrastructure... but I did pick up one little tidbit I found funny about St. Simon the Tanner (I found it funny, I am guessing a lot of other people would find it noble). He was a tanner, he worked with leather, particularly shoes, and one day a woman came in to get her shoes or sandals or whatever they wore at that time, repaired. She sat on the stool in front of St. Simon (then he was probably just called Simon) and opened her legs, giving him a glimpse of the promised land, well... the promised land for you and I.... but Simon considered this a great sin, and promptly stabbed his eye out as an act of penance. Was it really that bad buddy? I guess that’s why he’s a saint.

Like I said, the Coptic history stuff was all kind of boring, but we soon walked down the hill and into the Mokattam neighborhood, or Garbage City, home of the zabbaleen. There is a lot of information that gets into the details about how this community works, which is really fascinating, so I will just talk about a few of my personal observations. As always, wikipedia can give you a good base in understanding the culture of it all: http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_City. While it is often referred to as a slum, the residents here are all very hard working and even financially stable, but the business they work in, Cairo’s trash, and the houses they live in, which are often full of that trash, tends to sully the perception of their lifestyles.

In a nutshell, the men of the community travel throughout Cairo by trucks or by bicycle or by donkey drawn carts, and bring the collected garbage back to Mokattam. While they are out collecting trash, the women are back at home sifting through and sorting the trash... separating plastics, cardboard, tin, biodegradable’s, etc. The amount of sifting and sorting is unbelievable.... for example, after all of the plastic is sorted, it is all further separated out by color, bottle size, etc. Once the trash is sorted, the collectors sell the trash to brokers, who also live in the community. The brokers are the middle men, with connections to the buyers, many of whom live overseas. All in all, about 85% of the trash that makes it’s way to Garbage City is recycled in one way or another. Here is an interesting clip from the movie ‘Garbage Dreams’, a documentary that follows the lives of a few boys born and raised in Garbage City: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=jThxF_NYGWU.

As we walked through the streets we came across a small building with the door open and kids voices emanating from inside. Julie, always curious and never shy, poked her head inside and started asking questions. The place was a school for the local children to learn about the importance of what their community is doing, the importance of recycling. We chatted with the young man running the program, and it turns out he was the main boy from the movie. At the time of filming he was probably 17 and looking for a way out, now here he was, 25 and working hard to educate the people from his home. The school was very interesting, set up with the help of the company Proctor and Gamble. P&G has reached out to the residents of Garbage City, asking them to specifically find their plastic shampoo and conditioner bottles, which they buy back from the zabbaleen to be reused. The skeptical might call it a publicity stunt, but at least they are doing something and paying people fair value to do the work for them.

We finished the tour visiting a house that is kind of a pilot project for a few sustainable initiatives being implemented in Garbage City. This specific house installed bio-gas and solar hot water units on the rooftop, to alleviate energy costs for cooking and hot water. Our guide treated us to a lunch of tea, tangy potato chips, and hoho’s... and then unveiled the green technology to us. He retrieved a flexible conduit from the outside hallway and led us into the kitchen. He hooked the conduit up to a portable gas range, and then lit the burner... Taaddaa.... it was incredibly underwhelming... We all stood there wondering if that was it, the guide looking rather proud. So kind of confused, I said ‘Well... you just lit a burner? Can we actually see the units on the roof to see how it all really works?’. It had not really crossed his mind that this would be an interest of ours... We went up to the roof and saw how everything actually worked. It is pretty simple stuff. There was a large bin where you put all of the biodegradable waste. That waste is sealed and compressed and a bio reaction takes place in the bin as pressure is applied from above. An air chamber above collects the gas and funnels it through the flexible conduit which is run through the stair well down to the apartment. Walaaa.... Pretty low tech stuff. There were also a couple of hot water solar collectors on the roof too. It is a good start on a small scale, which is all they can really afford at this point... the Egyptian economy isn’t exactly thriving these days... But it would be interesting to see what would be possible implementing a system over the entire neighborhood... there is a lot of potential here, and certainly there would be a lot of benefit working with the economy of scale.

Reflecting on the visit, I suppose I found myself far more interested in the way this community functions, then in the small scale sustainable initiatives, and certainly more than the Coptic history of the area. Julie and I caught a taxi back into downtown, grabbed a couple of shewermas, and planted inside Cafeteria el Horreyya, one a few beer joints in the city, and one where women (western women), were welcome to join in the drinking. One beer turned into eight and our group of two grew into a group of six... and before I knew it I was being propositioned by a kinky hipster German couple, studying in Cairo for the year, looking to make a night of it... On that note I decided my night was coming to close and caught the metro back to Justine and Chris’.