Walking through the zabaleen area, a visitor is immediately drawn into a labyrinth of small roads hidden by piles of garbage. The taxi leaves you at the bottom of Moqattam hills before hurrying to escape the trash-filled neighborhood.
Garbage trucks and donkey carts lugging Cairo’s refuse go back and forth into these narrow streets. The smell is overwhelming but the 60,000 garbage collectors, or zabaleen in Arabic, seem used to it. “Garbage City”, from which you can see some of the most famous monuments of Cairo, is their home and everything they have.
Garbage Dreams (2009), a documentary film directed by Mai Iskander and winner of 23 awards, delves into the lives of informal garbage collectors on the outskirts of Cairo by following three teenage boys: Adham, Osama and Nabil. The film was screened last week at the Darb 1718 Center in Cairo as part of the successful “Refugee Film Festival”, and in accordance with the center’s mission to “spread awareness about current issues,” as explained by center director Moataz Nasr.
Garbage City came into existence in the 1950s, attracting an influx of predominantly poor Christian farmers from southern Egypt. The recycling model they have created costs the state nothing as the zabaleen receive minimal payments by the Cairo residents.
While many western countries reach recycling rates as high as 30 percent, and foreign companies currently working in Cairo reach about 20 percent, the zabaleen can recycle an astonishing 80 percent of the trash produced by the city, transforming it into commodities. Nevertheless, in 2005 the government decided to privatize this service by contracting waste collection to foreign companies–one Italian, one Spanish, and an Arab-Italian joint venture–thus replacing the zabaleen with a modern waste disposal system. Like many waste collectors, the three teenage boys in the film are forced to make decisions that will affect their future and the survival of their community.
The movie persuasively demonstrates that “modernization does not always equal progress,” as Al Gore says commenting in the film. The incredulity that seizes the boys when they visit a landfill and see people throwing away valuable materials aptly represents the contested nature of modern technology.
The film was followed by a discussion with Ezzat Naeim Guindy, son of a garbage collector and founder and manager of the Spirit of Youth Association, Nathalie Manadily, awareness-raising and communication manager at the same NGO, and three characters in the documentary, who all outlined steps to improve the current situation.
The Spirit of Youth Association has started a five-year garbage segregation campaign funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which intends to spread awareness in schools, universities, restaurants, NGOs, clubs, companies, and offices to teach Cairo’s citizens how to sort their trash for recycling. The purpose is to convince people to separate their waste into two groups: organic (waste and food remains) and non-organic (everything else).
“There is currently a team of 30 people working on this awareness campaign,” Manadily explained. “They conduct follow up visits in order to make sure people are separating their waste. Our association also has a website and a Facebook page, and we are launching an SMS campaign. Anyone who is interested in the subject can send an blank message to 6069 (at the normal rate of any SMS) to get more information about source segregation.”
According to Manadily, Zamalek is the first neighborhood in which the association is implementing the waste segregation campaign. They plan to cooperate with foreign companies in the next few years to cover the entire city.
Manadily is optimistic about the future. “The situation hasn’t changed yet, but once everyone begins to implement source segregation, the time spent sorting the waste in zabaleen homes will be reduced, and they will be able to quickly recover non-organic waste, which can be a good source of income. Besides, the formalization of their status will give them rights: they will be licensed by the government and sub-contracted by multi-national companies, giving them opportunities to upgrade their recycling businesses.”
According to the United Nations Development Program, recent estimates from the World Bank show that 23 percent of the Egyptian population lives below the national poverty line and over 12 percent of children under the age of 5 suffer from malnutrition.
The Spirit of Youth Association also runs the Recycling School–built in partnership with multinational cosmetic companies, such as Proctor and Gamble–which aims to teach children how to read and write, in addition to offering them programs in health, computers, literacy, and art and drama. The school also runs a recycling project, giving children an opportunity to learn and help their families.
According to Manadily, waste collection is not an abusive form of child labor. “If they don’t work and they don’t help their families, they’ll be out on the streets with nothing to do. Thanks to the school these children can support their family businesses and, at the same time, they receive training to be traders and company owners.”
As Adham says in the film, “Reaching the pinnacle is hard but you have to climb one step at a time.” This is precisely what the garbage segregation campaign wants to achieve.
