They’re called zabaleen, after an Arabic phrase meaning ‘garbage people’, and you wouldn’t want to be one:

Most of the inhabitants of Garbage City are Coptic Christians.

An estimated 60,000 – 70,000 Zabaleen live in an area known locally as Garbage City, and are mostly descendants of poor farmers from Upper Egypt who settled in the city in the 1950s. By virtue of their being Coptic Christians and of their occupation, the zabaleen are discriminated against, and face compounded hardships brought about by the pervasive corruption and kleptocracy of Egypt’s governance. Since they’re not Muslims, social services provided by Islamic organizations are not extended to them as well.

But their lives, which until four months ago were merely difficult, have now become even harder, for as the Boston Globe reported last June, the Egyptian government decided their mode of living represented a health hazard – a result which has had remarkable unintended consequences that tell us something profound about slums.

Zabaleen pigs, before they were slaughtered

CAIRO – A bent man walks with a sack of garbage draped over him, hiding all but his legs as he lopes up the hill toward women and children with quick hands and shrewd eyes for spotting things of value.

Trash trailing off him, he teeters around a corner and disappears into a parade of bent men. Sacks drop and flies gather in dark, humming whirls. Hands scrape plastic and rip cardboard, but a sound is missing.

The squeal is gone.

Pigs are not to blame for the so-called swine flu, which in any case has not been found in this hilltop slum, but trucks flanked by armed police have come anyway and hauled away the pigs.

Raised by Coptic Christian garbage collectors who fattened them with trash and sold them to non-Muslim butchers, the animals were among the 300,000 pigs the government ordered corralled and culled. Their silence means that what scant prosperity there was amid these cliffs has vanished.

A zabaleen boy and his family’s pigs, in the time before

As amplified in a later Boston Globe article (whose text is in burnt orange), the zabaleen were not only slum dwellers but a society of ragpickers:

For more than half a century, those collectors were the zabaleen, a community of Egyptian Christians who live on the cliffs on the eastern edge of the city.  They collected the trash, sold the recyclables, and fed the organic waste to their pigs – which they then slaughtered and ate.

[In spring, 2009], President Hosni Mubarak ordered that all the pigs be killed in order to prevent the spread of the [H1N1] disease.

Bound for the slaughter

As I’ve previously posted, ragpicking in a slumdweller’s profession as old as slums. 

Manet, The Ragpicker, circa 1869

Informal professions have a few advantages:

They require little formal education.

They need no permits.

They reward initiative, enterprise, and a strong work ethic.

The law tends not to enforce against them, since they are peaceable and provide a useful service no one else wants to do.

One of 15 members of a ragpickers’ co-op, Sao Paulo

“Doing the jobs Americans won’t” has become a rallying cry for the immigration debate, and whatever one thinks about immigration, it’s certainly true that throughout history, some professions have been done only by those who could find no other.

In economic terms, everybody’s trash becomes somebody else’s job:

Distasteful though we might find it, it is a profession:

Man and donkey hauling trash back to Garbage City

“How will I feed my children now? I’ve lost 70% of my income,” says Ramzi Shawki, whose 120 pigs lived in a pen next to his house until they were driven away, slaughtered, and buried in trenches. “Our pigs are not sick. I can hold them in my arms. I’m 41 years old. I was born into collecting garbage and raising pigs. I’ve never been infected. But whoever doesn’t give up their pigs gets arrested.”

The Shawki clan and many of their neighbors in a cliffside neighborhood of Cairo survive by collecting garbage. They also raised pigs until the government ordered 300,000 swine killed amid concerns – now dismissed – that the animals spread the epidemic. (Asmaa Waguih for The Los Angeles Times)

Cairo’s Garbage City: note trash on the rooftops

Whatever the motivations, the government sought to provide compensation:

“The government gave me 2,500 pounds for my animals,” about $450, says Shawki, “but they were worth 18,000 pounds.”

That might not be our perspective, but people see what they expect to see.

“This is not a slum,” says one. “It is good up here, not like people say.”

Like many slums, it is also a hive of activity – low-skilled, low-technology, low-paying activity.

Sorting the trash into recycling

Like many slums, Garbage City was founded on low-value land:

They feel safe up here, though sometimes boulders shear off the brittle cliffs and smash rooftops below.

Safety is relative – Garbage City was the only land from which it was not worth displacing the poor.

Most of these men arrived in Cairo as boys decades ago from villages in southern Egypt.

People move to cities in search of a better life.  They gravitate to slums because that’s where the affordability is, and where the low-skilled jobs are. 

Sorting bottles for recycling of their plastic

Four months ago, their livelihood was wiped out by government action that smacks more of prejudice and fear than reason:

President Hosni Mubarak ordered that all the pigs be killed in order to prevent the spread of the disease when the swine flu fear first emerged, long before even one case was reported in Egypt.

Slander led to slaughter:

When health officials worldwide said that the virus was not being passed by pigs, the Egyptian government said the cull was no longer about flu, but about cleaning up the zabaleen’s crowded, filthy, neighborhood.

I doubt that, for slum cleanup has been used as a code word for slum eradication for centuries – and as far as I know, the Egyptian government did nothing other than kill all the pigs who, though dead, are taking their revenge:

The pigs used to eat tons of organic waste. Now the pigs are gone and the rotting food piles up on the streets of middle-class neighborhoods like Heliopolis and in the poor streets of communities like Imbaba.

There is trash, which must be piled up, and there is garbage, which can be eaten

 “The problem is clear in the streets,’’ said Haitham Kamal, a spokesman for the Ministry of State for Environmental Affairs. “There is a strict and intensive effort now from the state to address this issue.’’

But the crisis should not have come as a surprise.

When the government killed all the pigs in Egypt this spring – in what public health specialists said was a misguided attempt to combat swine flu – it was warned the city would be overwhelmed with trash.

It’s tempting to see slumdwellers as ‘those’ people, the more so when they have a different ethnicity, a different religion.

Zabaleen children, photographed by Melissa Leiter

What started out as an impulsive response to the swine flu threat has turned into a social, environmental, and political problem for the Arab world’s most populous state.

All those people, all that refuse

The health outbreak – a health-risk epidemic caused by a misguided attempt to address a health risk! – serves as proof of so many principles concerning the complexity and interdependence of slums.

“Everything’s connected to everything else”

It has exposed the failings of a government where:

Let’s count them.

[1] Markets move faster than governments

The power is concentrated at the top.

 [2] At AHI we believe that the best level of government to tackle slums is municipal, because municipal government cannot escape the slums on their doorstep.

Decisions are often carried out with little consideration for their consequences.

[3] Slums are cities’ Cryptobiotica: ‘those’ people provide essential services at low investment and low labor cost.

Hard work, low pay

[Here is a good Zabaleen photo essay. – Ed.]

[4] Slums are resilient, both robust and change-resistant:

Where follow-up is often nonexistent

“The main problem in Egypt is follow-up,’’ said Sabir Abdel Aziz Galal, chief of the infectious disease department at the Ministry of Agriculture.

[5] Markets will always find practical solutions when government doesn’t.

Speaking broadly, there are two systems for receiving services in Egypt: the government system and the do-it-yourself system.

Want to guess which is more popular?

Cairo’s garbage collection belonged to the informal sector. The government hired multinational companies to collect the trash, and the companies decided to place bins around the city. But they failed to understand the ethos of the community. People do not take their garbage out. They are accustomed to someone collecting it from the door.

Pickup and dropoff, an informal service

A key blockage to slum upgrading and formalization is that entry into the visible, legal, electronic formal system swaps in a new form of inefficiency (bureaucracy) for an old one (corruption and baksheesh).  Just as means-testing can create an unwanted poverty trap, the ‘visibility surcharge’ is a huge drag on slum upgrading. 

Could he find a formal job?

California’s bureaucracy, for example, was recently estimated to be costing the state $500 billion a year, a sum so staggering it beggars the imagination.

“The straight and narrow path is just too bureaucratic and burdensome for the rich person, and for the poor, the formal system does not provide him with survival, it does not give him safety security or meet his needs,’’ said Laila Iskandar Kamel, chairwoman of a community development organization in Cairo.

Laila Iskandar Kamel

As I wrote in cryptobiotica, a slum is worthless only when seen from a distance:

Cities and slums are economic ecosystems, and just as a biological ecosystem has its biota, so to do all the active entities – that is, the companies, professionals, and individuals who operate within the ecosystem – comprise its ecota [my ungainly term].

From a distance, cryptobiotica looks like nothing much

Cryptobiotic soil is found throughout the world. In arid regions, these living soil crusts are dominated by cyanobacteria, and also include soil lichens, mosses, green algae, microfungi and bacteria.

In other words, what appears from our vast height to be simply dried mud is actually a complex interdependent community of organisms that have eked an existence out of an inhospitable and apparently empty environment.

Sort of like the people who live in slums.

Cairo and the Egyptian government didn’t realize that they needed the pigs; they needed the zabaleen; they needed Garbage City. 

Order out of chaos: value out of poverty

Now they’ve destroyed its livelihood, and it may be too politically embarrassing to walk back from that mistake.

What the Egyptian government did is understandable.  That doesn’t excuse it, nor make it wise.

Where will his work be?  Where his education?

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