Just to hold your focus, to assess the distance between your own position and your goal, between the line on the ground which your foot mustn't pass and the shimmering marbles in the dark dust of the alley. These beautiful marbles that lie so close that the blue-yellow veins inside can be seen exactly, and so far that they cannot be grasped.
The eight-year-old brushes back his close-cropped hair and concentrates before the throw, in order to make everything except the glowing glass balls disappear from his field of vision: the torn-open garbage bags around him, on the roofs of the houses, in the open courtyards, in the alleys, the piles of sacks and bags still to be handled, the ocean of garbage, in which the women from his slum wade, by which they are flooded, every morning, when the men come from the city in their donkey-drawn carts and vans and pour them out, the next wave, the detritusof the metropolis of Cairo.
Bishoy slides his left foot somewhat closer to the marked boundary and raises his hand in order to assess the distance. Then he really no longer sees what does not lie inside the radius of the desired objects: the mothers with their lacerated hands who pick kitchen waste, batteries, plastic syringes and shampoo bottles out of the bags, the siblings who play on the contaminated ground with torn open oil cans and suck the deformed corners of old PVC-coating.
Perhaps someone taught him that, this balance between attention and inattention. Perhaps he has acquired it in the eight years of his life: the ability to block out what could prevent him from making his throw, from winningthe marbles that jumpwith this slightly clanking noise when he hits them and that he can then put in his baggy pocket, not without having held them up to the light once again. Not even the squeaking of the brown-black pigs around him that are biting each other sorein their fight for the tossed out chunks of rancidfoodstuffscan take it away from him, this fleeting moment of bliss.
They seem to collect them, these moments that seem as improbable as impossible in a slum on the eastern periphery of Cairo, in which in factonly garbage was supposed to be collected and sorted. There cannot be many of them. How many successful days can be contained in a life like this?
For 40 years they have lived in this place, newcomers, who still have not arrived. For 40 years they have been unwanted, the Coptic-Orthodox Christians from Upper Egypt, who after the war against Israel had fled with their pigs from the chaos and poverty in their villages and who now live in chaos and poverty here. For 40 years they have been collecting what others throw out, they sort and clean what others have sorted out and sullied. They do not work in a factory but at their homes, not with a machine but by hand.
They will probably not have collected many moments of bliss under the circumstances. But what do we know? We who offhand see nothing but the endlessnessof the garbage city of Manshiet Nasser with its 80,000 inhabitants who live in and with the garbage.
We who are looking at this slum on the slopes of the Muqattam Hills with inexperienced eyes and see nothing but apocalyptic landscapes of garbage. Garbage, piled up, stacked, wrapped, distributed, opened, strewn,garbage in all shapes and of all measurements, in all rooms and on all surfaces, on roofs, on stairs, in and in front of the houses. We see the unhygienic conditions, the ecological catastrophe, the social rift between the fabricateddream of a modern metropolis in the center of Cairo and the living nightmare of pre-modern neglect at the periphery.
Everything dissolvesbefore our eyes, becomes one impenetrable mass of living, mobile, dead, immobile, animal, human detritus – one big, waftingagglomeration of misery. What do we know?
Samir knows how to find his luck. The 64-year-old recognizes it even in the somber twilightbefore dusk, in these hours in which the moloch Cairo with its 18 million inhabitants has not yet awakened. Luck does not come by chance. It has a system. Whoever wants to grab it must know and keep the order of procedures. Samir always begins at the corner of the market place of old Cairo, where the little white Cherokee pickup is parked, in which they have come down all those kilometers from the Muqattam Hillson the outskirts of the city. Every day at about 4 o'clock, every day at the same street crossing, right by the baker, the only accomplice in these lonely hours, who indefatigably kneads his dough until it is smooth.
From there Samir heads out, at an easy pace,work has only just begun, the huge wicker basketstill unburdened,his back erect. First the right side of the street. Westwards, towards the Nile. Never zigzag between the two sides of the alley.One after another. House by house. He pushes open the first wooden door with its flakingpaint and steps into the darkness of the unlit stairwell. Samir can climb themblindly, the fragilecrumblingstone stairs, this is how familiar they are to him. It is quiet in the corridor, where only the rustlingnoise of Samir's quick-paced steps reverberates through the foothills of the night. Storey by storey, step by step he does his roundsand asks for garbage, knocking."Zebalah," he then shouts from below.
Some neighbors have already put their bags in front of the door, so that Samir can take it right away. For others, the knocking is their wake-up call, and they pass their garbage through the crack of thedoor silentlyand with puffy eyes. But Samir waits to pick up the bulgingbags until he has reached the uppermost storey. Then he humpsthem, one after another.
Only a beginner will collect the garbage in the order in which he finds it. Samir no longer has the strength for this kind of mistake. On the way up he can still go easyon his back, only on the way down he piles up the burden. Only a quiet rustle can be heard, when he dumps the plastic bags in the basket on his back with a skillful swing,storey by storey, from top to bottom. For 30 years he has collected garbage. And he knows that order saves pain. With the full basket Samir wanders to the next house, again he knockshis way upwardstorey by storey and drags the spoilsdownward step by step. Apartment by apartment. House by house. Until the basket bends the wiry body of the old man like a reed and Samir has to brace himself against the load on his back with slow steps, back to the pickup truck with its loading space.And from there, back to the houses that have not yet been taken care of.
With the light of dawn the silhouettes of the faithful on their way back from morning prayers at the mosque appear. Absorbed in themselves, in an internal dialogue,they pay no attention to the toiling shape, whose sight is so familiar that one no longer notices it and which would attract attention only if one day it would no longer be there.
"Quit? I can't," says Samir, without slowing down the pace of his steps. "I am too old to go on working and to poor to quit. What should I live off?"
Without a pension and without savings, it is knowledge that Samir passes on to the next generation as his greatest asset, to the young men who drive down here with him from the slum, every morning, when it is still dark. Samir never learned to read and write, and thus he was not able to read the paper in which it is being explained to him why his house is not supposed to belong to him, even though he has lived there for decades and has paid all electricity and water bills. And he cannot understand why the slum is supposed to be illegal, why what they built there from nothing does not belong to them, only because they never acquired the land.
But about the structure of the garbage, the logic of the streets and the rhythm in which they must be combed through, Samir knows more than anybody else. He knows about the caution with which the garbage must be lifted,so that nothing will pokethrough the thin bags. He knows that garbage from apartments is preferable over that from offices, that a light bag is pleasant but not promising, that paper is nice to sort but cannot be sold as expensively as plastic or glass. The boys who areapprenticed to him trust Samir. That he has survived this work for all those decades is proof enough: not only of his experience but also of his luck.
With the sun they reach the slum, the cars with the mountainsof garbage slowly snake their way through the narrow, unpaved alleys, in which everyone is waiting for them already: women and children, those who do not collect but sort, here in this peculiarworld, in which over time the eyeis trained and values are turned upside down. In whichit has become a collective gift to filter the useful from the ostensibly useless, to discover in these masses of the superfluous what is necessary.
The work in the garbage is passed on in the families, over generations, with growing experience and sinking hope to ever find permanent employment in the closed Egyptian society. They cannot hold land as family property, no business, no house, but "their" streets, "their" corridors are passed on like a family estate.The father passes on to his son "his street," where he has knocked on doors all his life, it "belongs" only to him. Nobody else is allowed to collect garbage there, nobody must challenge them for it.
Poor streets yield poor garbage. Rich streets yield expensive garbage. Every street has its own story, its own signature, its own garbage. The garbage men can read them, their streets, and they appropriate them over the years. It is a question of honor to abide bythe unwritten rules of inheritance in Manshiet Nasser.
Aryan would have been happy to see his son reject this heritage, if his child had found work without the garbage. For this the 54-year-old has prayed, every day, in his tiny living room with the painting of Christ directly opposite the Mickey Mouse wall hanging, every Sunday in the small congregationhere in the slum. He has encouraged him to study in the city so that he could find a job, stable work in a stable place. "But nobody wants us anywhere except in the garbage," says Aryan, and looks absent-mindedly at David, his six month-old grandson who lies wrapped up in a crocheted blanket on the hard sofa. "We can feed ourselves, but live - we can't."
On TV, The Godfather is showing in Arabic, and for Aryan and his family the world of the Italian mobstersin America is no more foreign than that of the Muslim elite in Egypt. He goes down, David in his arm, and sits down on the stairs to the open courtyard, where his wife Nayha and his two daughters-in-law stuff the last bit of plastic into filthy grey bags. Two Egyptian pounds for a kilo of plastic, this is the pay for their part in waste processing, the equivalent of 25 cents. Then it is passed on. To the next house, the next phase in this sophisticated system of cleaning and utilization. Across the entire slum there is a networkof sheds and enclosures, courtyards and roofs, the neighborhood functions like an open workshop with clearly prescribed steps of processing.
In the beginning, there is the purely manual work of women like Nayha, who gather the garbage from the bags and divide it into solidand organicwaste. This is the first criterionaccording to which things are classified. The remnants of food, the garbage from the containers from fast-food chains as well as from the garbage cansof private homes, Nayha immediately feeds to the pigs that grunt behind the loose board fence next to her and are fatteneduntil the ride to the slaughterhouse on the outskirts of Cairo is worthwhile. During the next operational step, cardboard is separated from plastic and glass and metal. She has it in her fingertips, the feeling for the various sorts of plastic and rubber, she tests the elasticity, the thickness, the colors, and throws the pieces of plastic in different containers, one after another, even the smallest container of cosmetics; every unfittoy car, every bottle top is thus touched, kneaded and sampledto test its usability.
What to us only comes across as generally useless, fans out into endlessly diverse forms of usefulness. Even the dirtiest, most mutilated piece of plastic is examined carefully. With the findings in the garbage, Nayha is careful as she would never be with herself; she protects even the oldest things more carefully than herself. Her chronic cough she carries around like a work coat; the untreated hepatitis C, of which well over half of the slum dwellers suffer, she does not notice and does not get examined for,as if she herself were more superfluous than the garbage that passes through her hands.
Then she passes them on, the sorted goods. The garbage has turned into a commodityduring the hours in the courtyard of Nayha and her daughters-in-law. Now, in sacks, it moves somewhat further up the alleys of the Muqattam Hills to Amir, who stands in front of his cast-iron, funnel-shaped shredder and pushes the sorted plastic containers into the cutting device.
"Not every piece of plastic brings in money," Amir explains, and with a large sieve shovels the small plastic parts from the belly of the machine,"it has to have the right density, the right color." The dark little squaresthat Amir producesare still warm when they are tied up in the next sack and passed on to Maher, the washer of the cut plastic, a few houses down the lane. "The shreds have to be clean," Maher explains, and rubs his running nose with the end of his wet rubber gloves, "otherwise no one will buy them." The Chinese merchants need clean plastic which they then ship and process in their factories. Into goretex jackets and shirts.
The word "globalization" Maher has never heard, but he does know that his work is important and valuable because Chinese people buy from him. And that this plastic one day reappears in products and clothing in other parts of the world, he also knows. And thus he pours the rustling puzzle piecesin the first wash tub with suds, from which not only his arms should be protected. In the tub they are stirred as in a metal mixer. Maher's assistant stands a few meters away, in front of the last home-made device, the tumbler, in which the flashing shreds are turned until they are dry. Afterwards the now-precious goods are packed in former sugar sacks and stacked. They stand in a corner, until the next car comes and takes them to the scales on the main street, on which themen sit in the open tea parlor on their stools, smoke the hookah and play dominoes, silently and somewhat suspiciously.
They know here how they are seen: dirty garbage men and women, shameless ones who will do anything, without respect for themselves, for who else would rummage around in other people's detrituswith their bare hands. They know the glance of the others, the one full of disgust that shuns the sight, and that full of pity that cannot bear the sight, one disgusted, the other empathic – exposingand ignorant at the same time.
They do not like it, this notion; this is not how they want to be seen. And thus they tell the stories of their work, incredulously at first and somewhat faltering, why the all-too self-evident should still be explained, how a good tradesman, to whom his skillful movements and his acquired education, his profound knowledge and his elegant technique have long turned into a habit, they talk about their work, the garbage in all its variety, garbage as a living environment. And the more the distrust disappears, the more their pride comes through.When they forget for a moment that it is strangers whom they are talking to, when onesucceedsat making them forget their fear of the distorting image that others make of them, their pride shinesthrough, their self-respect, despite it all, the respect they have acquired for their own work in the garbage.
"We are better than the foreign garbage companies," says Samir, while he shuffles down the stairs with the full basket on his back, "we come every other day, we know the houses and their inhabitants, we are more reliable." They feel vindicatedby the fact that the government's first attempt to commission foreign companies with the garbage disposal of the city has failed. The professional businesses did collect the money for the mission, but without really fulfilling it carefully. And thus, the garbage men from Muqattam re-conquered their work. Content, because in the others' failure they find their own quality confirmed.
They know that the government wants to expel them from Manshiet Nasser. Foreign companies are supposed to collect the city's garbage. An uninhabited area is supposed to serve as a place of work to the garbage sorters and processors. The life and work of the garbage men are to be separated. These are the prettyideas from Cairo. "They just want to get rid of us," says Aryan, shaking his head. An outsourcedplace where the garbage would be processed, that would be of no help. "How could we get there? How could we take our women there? Who would pay for it?"
That they could then live a less encumbered, cleaner life, does not come up in the conversations. Only fear to entirely lose the only foundation of their lives, their order that they have created for themselves, their pride which they will not have taken away from them.The garbage is their only constant, the one thing on which they can rely, in a neighborhood which is still considered illegal and in which they only feel safe as long as the superfluous exists. If the garbage fails to appear, if the garbage no longer comes here, other people will collect and sort it and they themselves will become superfluous. So simply they calculate their future.
The luxurious shopping malls of Cairo, in whose luminous, gold-ornamentedboutiques and cafés Cairo's urban middle-class fulfills the neoliberal visions of the city planners, are already encircling the garbage men in the Muqattam Hills. The land on which they live and work has become valuable over the past few years. The periphery to which they were sent in the sixties to keep them out has now become a potential construction area for the closed living quarters of the rich, who flee the smog and the noise of the capital.
"We will die with the garbage," says Aryan, "and if we lose the garbage my grandson will have no work at all, no life." He asks to see his picture in the display of the camera.He sat down upright for the portrait. And pulled his headscarf tighter around his head. They want to influence it, the image that others create of the garbage men, perhaps because they will not be around much longer.
Translation: Barbara A. Schmutzler and Marisa Elana James