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Cairo’s Garbage City: Holy Poverty in the 21st Century

Credit: Ilya Stepanov

 

A Russian photographer Ilya Stepanov has recently visited Cairo (Egypt) where he ventured into the infamous Garbage City in Cairo. The suburb Mokattam is inhabited by a community of the Zabaleen, the Coptic Christians who since 1950s have been making their ends meet by managing Cairo’s waste.

Credit: Ilya Stepanov

As We Make Money Not Art reports, “the Zabaleen generally perform this service very cheaply. Waste food is fed to livestock, mainly pigs; what cannot be repaired or reused -steel, glass, textile and plastic bottles- is sorted by hand and sold as raw materials; some material is burnt as fuel. It is claimed that Zabbaleen reuse or recycle 80-90% of the waste they collect (a figure that the most modern waste management systems can only dream of), however this must be put into context of the fact that the Zabbaleen concentrate on wealthier areas“.

Credit: Ilya Stepanov

Ilya has documented the state of utter poverty and antisanitary conditions. As he confesses, he couldn’t get into any house: partly because there was too much garbage blocking the way, partly because of the unwholesome odours. The problem is, photographers and even film-makers have been visiting the area for years now, and each of them leaves to tell us about the terrible conditions in which human beings live. The beings themselves, however, have nowhere to leave. Garbage City is their community, their home, their habitat. Their life.

As most of us would not know about this, the so-called sustainable recycling retains its glamorous appeal; however, another side of the coin is something we would decry in Europe (view comments to this post). The day I posted a photograph of garbage bags stacked by a bus stop in Manchester city centre in 2009, the picture astonished many people. On top of this lies the fact that the Zabaleen community is Christian, and hence the entire story receives an ideological spin: this is how Christians are being treated in an Islamic country.

Credit: Ilya Stepanov

One may contemplate forever, exactly why this kind of situation is possible. Then you watch the trailer to an independent film, Garbage Dreams, and something begins to make sense. The dangerous vapours, the threat of epidemics, the various complexes bred in youngsters by their occupation and by the society’s response, are all costrued by the Copts as “God’s will”. God lives in handmade cardboard boxes hanging between the houses. There is no church in the area, as Stepanov testifies: the House of God cannot stand amidst the waste and dirt. So it hangs in the air. There could hardly be a better illustration to the aloofness of religion in matters of human existence.

Islamic or not, Egypt is an independent country that is, like any other country, subject to epidemics. Considering the tourist appeal, the state powers should be willing to solve the problem with recycling. The Christian denominations, instead of debating female priests, contraception and homosexuality, should pay attention to the extreme conditions in which God’s children live. The mendicants were popular in their own time, but the Zabaleen are not serving God. They serve themselves and make their ends meet by accepting what is regarded as God’s will.

Credit: Ilya Stepanov

As for the Zabaleen themselves, this is a potent reminder of the great divide between the enlightened ones and those who wander in darkness. We speak so much in the West about the power of mind and endless possibilities awakened by our imagination. We love John Lennon’s “Imagine” because – supposedly – it takes us to the better world, at least in our head. It gives us motivation. I love “Imagine”, too, but when I was looking at those photos the only thought that was spinning in my head was: what do these guys and girls imagine? We can imagine a better life by reading Vogue, dreaming of George Clooney, or window shopping. We have an idea of a different life, for which we can strive. Now, imagine: collecting, sieving through, breathing, watching, living the garbage.What other life can you imagine when your head is filled with the waste your family recycles?

It is true, as Abraham Lincoln said, one cannot help the poor by being poor themselves. And fair enough, communities like Cairo’s Garbage City can be found in Europe and Russia. But this is the part of the world, together with Africa, that we, with our potent imagination, should drag out of its state. All wars, revolutions, epidemics etc. will be happening until these garbage cities exist. It is futile to fight the consequences of discrimination and inequality without attacking their roots.

Ilya Stepanov’s post with more photographs and a report in Russian. Apparently, the report will be continued, so bookmark the URL of his LiveJournal.

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