Cairo’s zabaleen want only respect in a rubbish life FEATURE 05/01/2010

Cairo’s zabaleen want only respect in a rubbish life

FEATURE 05/01/2010 CAIRO — Children stop their game of marbles and scatter as rubbish-laden trucks trundle up their dusty street, swarming with flies and grinding dead vermin beneath their wheels. The sight — and smell — is all too familiar in Zarayib, meaning “the Sties,” a shanty-town in northeast Cairo where the zabaleen make their living by sifting through garbage in search of anything recyclable. Before the Egyptian authorities a year ago ordered a total pig cull in the face of the outbreak of swine flu, the animals would do a lot of the messier work for the zabaleen, as Egyptians plying the garbage trade are known. Without the pigs, the women of Zarayib are now forced daily to sit atop mounds of detritus in the slum’s alleyways sorting rotting food from plastics and glass. The government said the cull of pigs, estimated in the tens of thousands, was a precaution against swine flu. The mostly Coptic Christian slum dwellers resisted, but eventually surrendered. But without the pigs the job is nowhere near as efficient and the scavengers are now forced to leave the organic waste in stinking mounds around Cairo or dump it in landfills.... MORE   Source:  The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100501com3.html

COMMENTARY EDITORIAL Junta on his mind FRONTLINE Denials galore FEATURE Cairo’s zabaleen want only respect in a rubbish life