The garbage is collected door to door in the night and brought back to the village where it is sorted down to its essentials and every component that has value is gathered and sold to middlemen for whatever profits can be had. Though the swine flu put some of the process at risk, the food waste is still fed to pigs that are raised for meat. The community livelihood has also been threatened by the government awarding collecting contracts to foreign companies. There are also many challenges to health and safety in this community given handling of this kind of waste.
We visited a boy’s school in the community where children are supported in learning basic literacy skills as well as teaching safe and productive waste management. Our Mission in Cairo also has a volunteer working here with a women’s group. C. works in a little community in the heart of Mokattam Village which seems like an oasis from the myriad flies and rich odour in most of the village.
We enjoyed a generous lunch with these lovely women who are recycling the waste products for jewellery, paper products, and fabric arts, all of which are sold in the village and to contracts that they have been able to secure. The women are taught the skills that might be most useful in making saleable products. C. has developed strong relationships with these women and she is well known in the community as caring and supportive.
To be in this community brought to mind that we forget that we live in a closed system. There is no such thing as throwing something away. There is no ‘away.’ To put something in our garbage cans or recycling boxes is not away, it’s just out of our minds. To be a Zabbaleen, despite what many may think, is to have dignity, to being doing something humble but terribly important in our throwaway culture. We would do well to have a community like this that is actively and safely recycling from our wastefulness, caring deeply for this gift we have been given.