Garbage City sits on the eastern edge of Cairo. About a hundred thousand people live there, and between them they recycle roughly 85% of everything Egypt throws away, which is a better rate than almost any municipal system on earth. There are no machines doing the heavy lifting. They collect the city's rubbish, bring it home, and sort it by hand on the floors of the buildings they sleep in.
I spent the day there with Maalem Shehata, who people call the Godfather of the Zabbaleen, and with his nephew Ezzat Naem. Shehata runs a syndicate of around a million collectors across Egypt, so if anyone can tell you how the money actually moves, it is him, and I can tell you it does not move the way outsiders assume it does.
The day starts at four in the morning and I followed it through. I watched them weigh and bale the paper, melt plastic bags down into pellets, and sort tin cans by hand on the floor. One man tested the quality of a batch of plastic by chewing it, which is not a skill I expected to be watching that morning. Pigs eat about 60% of the waste, so the community keeps them, and I got a good look at how much of the system falls over without them. A lot of the money goes into gold, because gold works as a bank account when you do not have one, and there is an informal bank running between neighbours on top of that. I was told you can start a business here for about a thousand dollars.
What I was not ready for was how ordinary the place feels from the inside. People are born into this, they make real livings from it, and some of them get rich. I went into the huge church cut into the cliff above the neighbourhood, and that is where I started to understand why the community is about 95% Christian, which is a story I get into properly in the film. The children go to school now. There is a weaving business run by the women. The men keep pigeon towers on the roofs and take Sundays off, and I was told that divorce here is close to unheard of.
None of that cancels the cost, and I do not want to write about the place as if it does. Born in trash, dead at 55 is roughly the shape of it. The dust and the smoke get into people. There is alcoholism, and there is the stigma, which everyone I spoke to has had to handle in one way or another. I asked whether it is fair to call this a slum, and I have left the answer where it belongs, in the film, rather than paraphrase it here.
I have tried not to flatten one side of this into the other. The tragedy and the enterprise sit in the same rooms, often in the same room, and if you only tell one of them then you have got the place wrong.
Filmed in Manshiyat Naser. Dina fixed and translated.