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Garbage City Teaches Recycling
FrontLines - December-January 2009-10
CAIRO—The Coptic monastery
of St. Samaan overlooks
Zabaleen, Arabic for Garbage
City, which gets its name from
the primary source of income for
its 60,000 inhabitants: garbage
collection and disposal.
The church carved into the
mountain is dedicated to the legend
that Egypt’s Coptic Christian
minority performed a miracle by
moving a mountain by faith to
thwart threats of extermination.
“So we can make a mountain
move, why can’t we recycle the
garbage?” said Ezzat Naem.
Naem, 45, grew up in Garbage
City. His father was a garbage
man. And his grandfather
was the city’s first garbage collector.
“He was an innovator,
like me,” Naem said.
In 2008, USAID awarded
Naem a two-year, $34,000 grant
to support his creation, a community
recycling school. It was
one of 22 grants made by the
Agency and the Synergos Institute,
through the Arab World
Social Innovators Program, to
support entrepreneurial humanitarian
men and women in Egypt,
Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, and
the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
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Abd Elghany Hamady Barakat, who was born blind into an underprivileged family, seamlessly maneuvers
the new American University in Cairo campus. Barakat received a USAID scholarship to attend AUC,
where he is majoring in political science and international relations. He said he hopes to start the university’s
first club for disabled students.
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At the recycling school, students
as young as 9 learn Excel,
Photoshop, and other computer
skills which are part of a real-life
recycling business. Students create
their own spreadsheets and chart
how many bottles they’ve collected,
their worth, and their profit.
The school generates about
$10,000 annually from recycling
products like shampoo bottles.
And students learn mathematics,
reading, and writing with the
goal of starting their own recycling
businesses.
Children in Garbage City wake
up at 9 p.m. and work with their
fathers until 2 a.m. before returning
home with recyclables found
in Cairo streets. The women work
into the morning sorting their
finds while their sons attend
Naem’s community school.
“In the beginning, I didn’t
even know how to write my
name, and now I’m doing mathematics,
and I know how to use
the computer,” said Ibrahim
Bakhit, 13, who collects recyclable
cardboard with his father
at night. “I insist on learning. I
want to know a lot of things.”
In addition to garbage sorting,
Garbage City residents earn
income from pig farming. Pigs
consumed 60 percent of organic
garbage before Egyptian officials
made the animals illegal earlier this year and slaughtered
them in a nationwide response to
H1N1, also called swine flu,
even though there is no evidence
the disease is spread by pigs.
Moreover, without pigs to dispose
of the waste, trash piled up,
causing environmental damage.
Incomes were further cut
when the Egyptian government
contracted three multinational
corporations to collect the city’s
garbage. But the townspeople
found a substitute in recycling.
The school remains largely for
boys—following Egyptian cultural
standards—but after-hours
computer workshops recently
began for girls and mothers.
The city smells of garbage.
Enormous bags of trash are
piled on rooftops, in doorways,
in alleyways, and strewn about
the streets.
But Naem’s students have
seen the alternative.
“We are so happy when we
go on field trips, spend time
together, and smell fresh air,”
said Naem, who kept his hometown
and family business secret
until he revealed it in a composition
that was praised by his
teachers. He has since gone on
to earn a bachelor’s degree in
commerce.
As a 12-year-old, Naem wrote
in his composition: “If a minister
or the president, himself, is absent
for a week, his vice can replace
him. But if a garbage collector is
absent, no one can replace him.”
FrontLines writer Analeed Marcus wrote this series of articles following a trip to Egypt in October. All photos by Analeed Marcus.
★
FrontLines is published
by the Bureau for Legislative and Public Affairs
U.S. Agency for International Development
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