This week I took a mini fieldtrip during the day to a place in the southern section of Cairo near a famous landmark, the Citadel. While the Citadel is beautiful and huge, our taxi drove past it to the neighborhood down the hill called Moqattam. Otherwise known as Garbage City, I had heard of this place by word of mouth from the sister of an officemate who has been volunteering at Garbage City's infant daycare (the shoestring, surviving-off-donations daycare). Garbage City is known for being a neighborhood with, as the name aptly describes, a lot of garbage, stacked and spilling out of buildings. The only history I have on this neighborhood is that migrants from Upper Egypt moved into this area in the 1940s.
If anyone is interested in working on their definition of "slum," this would be one place to look. Though you can see full bags spilled on the street or being hauled down the unpaved road in pickups, there is a system which keeps it all together, a small economy of its own which you can barely understand by walking around. All of the bags of trash are sorted through by the locals and culled for the glass, plastic and paper. Most of what you see in bags is sorted and bundled according to material type. The residents sort the city's recycling and, I am guessing, they get some money for it by turning it back over to the city (this part I am not exactly sure about). There is at least one part of the system that turns around a profit--the textile industry. Cloth, mostly jersey type cloth, is washed and woven or quilted into anything from rag rugs to handbags to potholders to stuffed animals. There is a small gallery where you can buy all of these things. These textiles are bursting with vivid colors and crafted with skill, each unique and original.
Because I was not interviewing or examining the daily life of the residents, nor do I know how the municipality and the community interact, I can only make very superficial observations. When I first got there, I likened the neighborhood to something out of post-apoctalyptic sci-fi movies like The Road Warrior trilogy. When I left, I could see the life of the locals as everyday--like any other living and working for a living on an economy of scale.
Attached you will find pictures from Garbage City. There are a couple of street shots, one of pigs gloriously bathing in the mud (a rare swine sighting for Egypt, I've been told), and the looms and girls who weave the rugs.
It is apparent to me that Cairo, from one section of town to another, has many lives and layers untold and all unto itself.
1 comment:
Hi Jeniferrrrr, I can tell you a little more about Garbage City. the inhabitants are Copts who migrated here from homes in upper (south) Egypt, I guess like you say in the 40s. Raising pigs gives some continuity with their lives in upper Egypt, raising something they were familiar with, and since they are Christian, well, no problem with the pork. How they fit into the garbage collector niche, I don't know. It used to be, and maybe still is, that a garbage czar for each area of the city, gave out routes. The garbage collector turned over all the fees from collection to the czar, but got to keep all the garbage. What scraps we throw out go to the pigs, food scraps. This is an extremely efficient garbage collection system as I think literally nothing gets wasted. Okay, Jennnnifer that is all I have to pass along about G.C., true or not.
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