By Preeti Aroon
Posted October 2008
Cairo’s zabaleen form the backbone of the city’s garbage disposal system. Largely scorned by Egyptian society, the trash scavengers recently lost one woman who had worked tirelessly for their well-being—Sister Emmanuelle, a Belgium-born nun who died Oct. 20 at age 99.
School of hard and smelly knocks: Two young students stand in front of their trash-filled home after coming back from school in al–Zabaleen, a poor area of Cairo, on Oct. 20. Belgium-born nun Sister Emmanuelle spent some 20 years here, helping establish schools and health clinics for poor trash scavengers known as zabaleen, a term derived from the Arabic word for “garbage.” At a school in Manshiet Nasser, a community populated by many zabaleen, children learn not only their ABCs (or Alif Ba, as an Egyptian would say), but the basics of trash collection and recycling, including how to track plastic bottles by computer.
Photo: KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images
Preeti Aroon is an assistant editor at FP.
Photo Essay: Cairo’s Trash Collectors Down in the Dumps
Carting it all away: A donkey is dwarfed by the enormous sacks of garbage it pulls on a cart through the trash-lined al-Zabaleen section of Cairo on Oct. 20, guided by a worker. Donkey carts are the zabaleen’s traditional mode of transporting refuse collected door-to-door from Cairo’s residents, typically for less than $1 a month. Cairo has an estimated 70,000 zabaleen, many of them descendants of poor farmers from Upper Egypt who migrated to the capital in the 1950s.
Photo: KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images
Photo Essay: Cairo’s Trash Collectors Down in the Dumps
At the bottom of the heap: Zabaleen, most of whom are Coptic Christians, rank decidedly at the bottom of Cairo’s social hierarchy. They work with garbage and raise pigs, a forbidden food in Islam, rendering them to be considered unclean by many from Egypt’s Muslim-majority population. Here, men sift through one of the great trash pyramids of Cairo on Oct. 20.
Photo: KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images
Photo Essay: Cairo’s Trash Collectors Down in the Dumps
Cash genies in these bottles: Zabaleen process about one third of the garbage generated by Cairo’s 17 million people. They recycle about 85 percent of it, painstakingly sorting the refuse into categories—plastic, metal, glass, paper, rags, organic waste—as these workers do on Oct. 20. Bags of plastic, metal, glass, and other recyclable items can be resold to businesses that turn the materials into new goods. Organic waste is fed to livestock, including pigs, whose meat can be eaten or sold to restaurants and hotels that serve Westerners who don’t face religious prohibitions against eating pork.
Photo: KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images
Photo Essay: Cairo’s Trash Collectors Down in the Dumps
A beloved nun passes away: Sister Emmanuelle, shown here in 2004, moved to Egypt in the early 1970s and spent the next two decades living among the zabaleen. She helped establish schools, gardens, and health clinics (many zabaleen contract hepatitis on the job). She was involved with efforts to provide vehicles for transporting garbage and worked on a project to create a composting plant that would turn the manure from the zabaleen’s pigs into fertilizer that could be sold. The organization she founded, Asmae-Association Soeur Emmanuelle, now has a presence in eight countries. On Oct. 20, Sister Emmanuelle died in France at age 99.
Photo: JEAN-PIERRE CLATOT/AFP/Getty Images
Photo Essay: Cairo’s Trash Collectors Down in the Dumps
A future that’s up in the air: To modernize its image, the Egyptian government wants to replace the zabaleen with sanitation companies that use gasoline-powered trucks to haul garbage to landfills. A few years ago, Cairo contracted with three European waste-management firms. Such firms, however, only handle about a third of Cairo’s trash, and many residents have been unsatisfied with their service. Additionally, sanitation companies have said they will hire zabaleen, but many scavengers have objected to the terms of employment. Here, a boy throws a ball upward in al-Zabaleen on Oct. 20. What will happen to the zabaleen? Right now, it’s a tossup.
Photo: KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images
Photo Essay: Cairo’s Trash Collectors Down in the Dumps
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