The Best American Travel Writing 2012

by Jason Wilson

  Executives like Nabil have a strong financial interest in co-opting the zabaleen: illegal dumping by zabaleen is the main source of multinationals’ fines. The problem spun out of control after the May 2009 pig cull. For the zabaleen, dumping was partially an instrument of revenge. Mountains of trash shot skyward from vacant lots across the capital, and multinationals took months to get the situation under control.

  Nabil hopes to discourage illegal dumping by bringing the assets of his company and the zabaleen in line. By contract, IES must recycle 20 percent of all garbage collected, a mark the company has never met. Nabil thinks the zabaleen could help his company reach the bar, and he plans to scratch their backs in return. He has advocated the construction of a transfer facility the zabaleen could use instead of an illegal dump site to sort recyclables from organic waste. The zabaleen could cart off all the recyclables they could manage, and IES could truck the organic waste left behind to composting facilities, where it could be turned into environmentally safe fertilizer for donation to rural farmers and counted toward IES’s recycling percentage.

  “If they dump garbage on the street, we incur more expenses to collect it, but if there was a place where they could come and sort in a hygienic plant, they could double or even triple their efficiency,” Nabil says. “To waste their experience is wrong. To use their experience is a win-win situation.”

  It’s just after eight on a May morning, and Moussa and Samaan are preparing for a long day at the shredder with taamiya sandwiches and tea at a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop down the street from their house. Today the machine under Moussa’s house will eat 1,700 pounds of plastic soda bottles. Baba Shenouda, the Coptic pope, drones from a fuzzy TV mounted in a corner. Moussa puffs on a gurgling waterpipe and hums along to the liturgy. One of the Zikris’ friends, a guy named Beshoul, takes it upon himself to introduce me to everyone in the shop. This is so and so, he works with PET plastic, he says, and this is so and so, he works with cardboard. Every zabaleen recycler has a specialty—they are master guildsmen of trash.

  Back at the house, Moussa and Samaan hoist open the corrugated iron door to their garage. Sunlight sends rats scurrying into the shadows. We scramble over filthy bags of bottles stacked to the ceiling to get to the back of the garage, where the shredder is plugged into a high-voltage socket. Wedged into a corner, we’re completely walled in by a fortress of 8-foot-tall bags stuffed with bottles. All that plastic does little to dampen the agonizing whine of the circular grinder Samaan uses to sharpen the shredder blades. I put on my sunglasses to protect my eyes from the bursting sparks, but Samaan just squints scornfully and keeps grinding.

  The men work with astonishing speed. Their shredder consumes each giant bag of bottles in about five minutes, and little by little the magic machine chews its way out of the hole. Like Rumpelstiltskin spinning a heap of straw into gold, these men are turning worthless bottles into cash. After a while the machine gets hot and begins to put off bitter fumes, a mix of diesel exhaust and vaporized plastic. There’s no ventilation except for the open garage door. Moussa tries to hide his running eyes from the smoke rising from the mouth of the machine. Veins bulge from his thin arms as he plunges bottles into the blades with a giant Aquafina jug. Samaan fills the hopper and shovels the growing pile of chips. He hangs empty bags by a nail driven through an icon of the Virgin Mary.

  At some point Samaan passes me cotton balls to stuff in my ears, but the damage is done. For the rest of the day I feel like I’m underwater. We take a break at noon and head to the coffee shop for a smoke. We wade through a 2-foot layer of 7-Up and Sprite bottles to get out of the garage—it feels and sounds exactly like wading through the balls at a McDonald’s PlayPlace. We stop to say hello to Moussa’s mother and father, who are squatting in a garage across the street, sorting plastic shopping bags into color-segregated bins. A donkey is tethered to a post next to where they’re sitting, and chickens are pecking at the dusty floor.

  Three giggling boys pile around the table where Moussa and I are sitting at the coffee shop. Their names are Samaan, Abanoub, and Gergis—names as common to Copts as Mohammed, Ahmed, and Mustapha are to Muslims. Moussa arm-wrestles with the boys, who clearly admire him. He’s a hotshot among the younger generation of zabaleen, with his microloan and his progress in the Recycling School, a nonprofit established to reach out to zabaleen kids left behind by the formal education system.

  Samaan sits alone in a corner of the coffee shop, scowling. His relationship with Moussa is frayed, but I haven’t found out why. We pay and go back to Moussa’s house, where his sister-in-law has prepared a lunch of chicken and stewed tomatoes. We pick hunks of meat off the chicken with pieces of flatbread. Moussa and Samaan don’t speak a word to each other, but Moussa’s sister-in-law is more relaxed today, now that Abanoub’s infection has passed. She sits with us and laughs at my Palestinian-accented Arabic. Samaan, suddenly in a foul temper, sucks the joy from the room. He snarls at the kids whenever they stray too close.

  After lunch Moussa takes me to visit his English tutor, a thirty-two-year-old bachelor named Rizeq Youssef. We find him at a table on the street in front of his grandmother’s house at the edge of the Garbage City, where the zabaleen’s realm butts up against the vast Muslim slums. We wait for Riz, as Moussa calls him, to wrap up a business deal on his mobile. Riz runs a bustling PET-chip exporting business—PET is the variety of plastic used to make soda bottles—and the café next to his grandmother’s place is the closest thing he has to an office.

  As we wait, Riz’s workers unload grain sacks full of unwashed green plastic chips from a truck. Each sack weighs about 80 pounds, and there must be thirty of them. Riz has just purchased the chips from a shredder, and now his workers will wash the chips in a series of vats to remove debris and remnants of labels. Then they’ll dry the chips in the sun and repackage them for shipment to China.

  Riz is tall with graying hair, a mustache, and a pocked, chubby face. He got into the PET business about ten years ago, and he’s got his operation down to a science. He exports one ton of chips to China for a total cost of about $515, including labor and shipping expenses. He exports 40 to 60 tons of PET each month to Chinese importers, who resell the chips to textile manufacturers at a 20 percent markup. Riz splits the profit with the importers. The real value enters when Chinese manufacturers turn the chips into polyester, which eventually makes its way to American shopping malls in the form of tracksuits and sneakers.

  Riz’s business only works on an economy of scale. He buys chips from dozens of shredders, including Moussa, and deals in huge volumes. He employs seven men and runs his washing workshop six days a week. “I’m happy if I make fifty dollars per ton,” he says. At $50 a ton and 60 tons a month, Riz earns about $36,000 a year. Hardly a king’s ransom, but he has ambitions. He’s saving to buy a machine that will help him increase his output to 15 tons daily, putting him into serious cash.

  Riz considers himself extremely lucky. His father was a science teacher at a government school who went out on a garbage collection route on the weekends, and his mother worked as a garbage sorter. His parents scrimped to send him to the private Gabbal Moqattam School, founded in 1981 by a Belgian nun named Sister Emanuelle. There were no schools at all in the Garbage City prior to the opening of Gabbal Moqattam, and Riz was one of the first enrolled students. Today he is one of the school’s most celebrated graduates.

  Riz went on to get a university teaching degree and become a teacher, “but I was always working both jobs,” he said, and “my business was suffering. I like teaching, but I think my mind is more suited to business.” Still, Riz can’t shake a sense of community obligation, so he spends his free time outside his grandmother’s house writing down English vocabulary for neighborhood kids and coaching them through their homework. As we talk, Moussa plucks words out of our conversation and scrawls them out in shaky English letters in his notebook. Riz pauses occasionally to correct him.

  Moussa listens with wonderment as Riz rattl
es off calculations: so many tons of chips from the shredders equals so much profit from China. If Moussa keeps working and studying, he could develop a business like Riz’s someday. As we walk back from Riz’s in the dwindling sunlight of early evening, however, Moussa grows sullen. I quickly understand why. When we arrive at his street, Samaan comes flying out of the coffee shop in a rage.

  “Where were you!” he screams. “I’ve been calling you all afternoon!”

  Moussa had taken off after lunch to visit Riz and left Samaan alone to contend with the sea of green bottles.

  “My battery died! Besides, I told you I had a lesson today,” Moussa growls. Samaan throws up his hands and storms off. Moussa and I keep walking toward the highway, where I’ll catch a taxi home.

  “Sometimes when I’m alone,” he says, “I write my whole life down. I ask myself, what can I do with my life? Can I live outside? Maybe I can leave Egypt. I am tired of this life. I am tired of carrying my whole family.”

  He mumbles something.

  “What did you say?” I ask.

  “Ar-rab yesouah aarib min i-khaifeen.”

  The Lord Jesus is close to the afraid.

  Ezzat Naem has come a long way since his childhood years, when he spent his days sorting garbage with his parents. Now he’s director of the Spirit of Youth Association, which oversees the Recycling School for Boys. “Children’s education is the first thing to go during economic hardships,” Ezzat told me. A successful girls’ school program founded by the Association for the Protection of the Environment in the 1980s, centered on crafts projects and literacy, paved the way for the Recycling School, which now has a hundred and fifty boys enrolled.

  Moussa is the equivalent of an eighth-grader at the Recycling School, which focuses on literacy and arithmetic while striving to harness students’ entrepreneurial zeal. There is no telling how sophisticated young zabaleen could become with strong foundations in mathematics and market analysis. Like most boys of his generation, Moussa never received any formal education before starting at the Recycling School at age sixteen. Government schools in Manshiet Nasser average sixty students per classroom, and the overcrowding deprives students of individual attention. Parents pay for after-school private lessons in order for their kids to pass yearly exams. But lessons cost nearly $200 per year, and zabaleen kids are also sorely missed during the workday, when they care for siblings and help process garbage.

  In order to convince parents to send their kids to school, teachers had to show that students could still contribute to family income. Students at the APE girls’ school received a dollar per day for the weaving work they did between lessons, and upon graduation they received a loom in their home and free rug-making material. The school would then buy the girls’ woven products and sell them to wealthy Egyptians. The girls’ school is now in its thirtieth year, and the Recycling School hopes to emulate its success.

  About half of the boys enrolled at the Recycling School earn money by gathering, weighing, and destroying shampoo and conditioner bottles. Procter & Gamble funds the school as part of its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) regimen, but also because it was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to counterfeiters, who used to buy stockpiles of bottles, refill them, then sell them on the street. Since the Recycling School opened in 2004, its boys have destroyed 250,000 bottles.

  I visited Moussa at school one day and found him sitting at a low table with two students about his age and two little boys who were about twelve. The walls were painted in exuberant purples and pinks and the ceilings were strung with shampoo bottle craftwork. The room had the feel of a kindergarten, and a fair number of the boys in the room looked about kindergarten age. They were the lucky ones, to have such an early jump on education.

  Moussa was taking down dictation in Arabic from a young female teacher. At another table, little boys worked math problems with an abacus. Moussa didn’t seem worried that his classmates were less than half his age. He lives and breathes the Recycling School. He is studying hard for an exam that will allow him to matriculate to high school, and he would probably live at the school if they’d let him.

  “Moussa can make it if he believes in himself,” said Ezzat Naem, another one of Moussa’s heroes. It was Ezzat and the staff of the Recycling School who helped arrange Moussa’s microloan. “He snatches at opportunities. He’s hungry for chances and willing to work hard. If he is ambitious enough, he can do anything.”

  Mariam Abdel Malik must have been expecting me to arrive at the Ministry of Planning with an entire television crew. She had a dozen plates of cookies set out on the giant conference table, and I think she was disappointed when she realized I had come alone. I had come to the Ministry of Planning to glean their plans for the future of the Garbage Village and the rest of Manshiet Nasser, and Mariam was going to be my guide.

  There is a lot of anxiety in the Garbage City about the possibility of a forthcoming eviction, and a lot of historical evidence to suggest it might happen.

  Ezzat Naem singled out real estate developers—not multinational waste management firms—as the greatest threat to the zabaleen community. He fears the government will force the zabaleen from Garbage City just like they were forced out of Imbaba forty years ago. They survived the previous eviction, but it’s different now. Back then zabaleen lived in shacks and owned only the clothes on their backs and their pigs. Now they live in a city they’re proud of, that they’ve built with their own hands and the sweat and ingenuity of generations. “The house is the primary investment and the primary site of business,” Ezzat told me. “You can’t do this work from an apartment. It just doesn’t work. Families need their garages to store materials and to keep their machines.”

  I keep Ezzat’s anxiety in mind as Mariam, a middle-class Egyptian who happens to be Christian, leads me through a PowerPoint on the Greater Cairo 2050 Master Plan. “Seventy-five percent of the population of Cairo lives within a twenty-kilometer diameter,” she tells me. “The population density is extreme, and the purpose of the plan is to decentralize Cairo to reduce population density.”

  Illustrations flit across the screen of a place that looks like Orlando, not the traffic-choked, polluted mess outside the ministry’s doors. Leafy trees line wide boulevards devoid of people and cars, and aerial sketches show swaths of jungle canopy over much of the city’s slums. The few cars there are conspicuously observe the limits of their lanes—the surest sign that these images are from a fantasy Egypt.

  When Mariam comes to a slide of a giraffe bending down to lick an ice cream cone held out by a blond woman in a sports car in the middle of the desert, a ministry employee named Nahed deadpans, “Now this is the future.”

  “Yes, this is too much,” Mariam laughs.

  I ask Mariam to return to a slide diagramming Cairo’s residential areas according to three status labels: planned, unsafe, and unplanned. Part of the Master Plan, as Mariam explained, is to relocate everyone living in unsafe and unplanned areas to new satellite cities in the desert. The government will demolish the slums—including large portions of the historic City of the Dead, where an estimated 25,000 squatters have turned tombs into homes—and attempt to bring back the expansive green spaces that existed in Cairo’s Nile watershed just twenty years ago.

  “We will build new apartments in unpopulated areas for the people in unsafe areas who are to be relocated,” she says. Unsafe areas include areas under power lines, areas where access streets are not wide enough to permit emergency vehicles, flood-prone areas, and areas under cliffs. Those conditions describe almost all of Cairo’s most crowded downtown neighborhoods, as well as large areas of Giza, including the slums that abut the Great Pyramids.

  The entire Moqattam area is unsafe in at least two of those categories—it’s on the cliffs, and its tiny alleys would be all but impossible for an ambulance driver to navigate. I was on hand two years ago when a rockslide in the Duweiqa neighborhood next to the Garbage City killed over a hundred people. In this
instance, the rockslide happened at a place that was easy for ambulances and fire trucks to access, but it didn’t matter. It took days for the Egyptian rescue services to finally admit that they had no idea how to break apart the giant boulders to unearth those buried beneath. The most tragic aspect of the disaster was that the government had finished construction several years before on hundreds of new apartments for families living under and above the Duweiqa cliffs, but had never distributed them. Rumors surfaced after the rockslide that the bureaucrat in charge of placing at-risk families in the new apartments sold them to his friends instead.

  As Mariam tells me about the relocation plans and shows me mockups of the Disneyesque Future World the government will build for Cairo’s poor, I think of the giant boulders on top of crushed Duweiqa homes and the lines of riot police. Not in another forty or a hundred years could I imagine a relocation project on the scale Mariam is describing. If the government won’t invest in proper schools and hospitals for the poor, why would it hand them the keys to a new city?

  I inquire directly about the ministry’s plans for Manshiet Nasser. “Unsafe areas will be khalas,” Mariam says, wiping off an imaginary slate. “They will have a choice between an apartment or money.”

  “So there will be no people living here in 2050?” I ask, pointing to the Garbage City on the map.

  “No.”

  If you hang around the Garbage City long enough, you start to think that things aren’t so bad. You give up trying to keep your shoes clean and you stop worrying about where you sit or the fact that no matter how many times you clean your fingernails, they’re always lined with black. After a while you don’t think about it when you shake someone’s hand who has just had their arm elbow-deep in trash. You leave your Purell at home.