Garbage city

I want to tell you all about a place I had heard about for a long time, but actually went there for the first time the day before yesterday.

Let me begin by telling you about a group of people known as the Zabbaleen (garbage collectors). They originally moved to Cairo 60 or so years ago from villages in the south of Egypt (known here as Upper Egypt). They were farmers by trade, Coptic christian pig farmers. They settled at the bottom of mount Mokattam with their pigs, and began scavenging for scraps to feed their animals. In doing so they realized that they could collect people's rubbish and feed the pigs from scraps found in that; they could also sort the rubbish and find small treasures. This grew and grew and nowadays they pick up 1 third of Cairo's trash, recycling a whopping 85% of it. The men go from door to door in the massive city collecting bags of rubbish, while the women and children stay in Mokkatam sorting through the trash by hand. The plastics, paper, tin and aluminum are separated and the organic waste is fed to the goats. (The Egyptian government culled all of the pigs in the swine flu hysteria).
I don't want it to seem like some dream place where the environment is the main concern. Its not! these people live in a slum, its a slum they have built from nothing and they have  managed to upgraded their metal huts to brick apartments, which I think says an awful lot about their durability. But the place is awful and very, very poor. If you have ever walked past a small heap of rubbish rotting in the Cairo heat, then you can try to imagine how rancid the place smells. They are literally living on a rubbish dump. The name garbage city is by no means an exaggeration this is a city full of garbage.
Things are improving slowly, a school has been built and at least some of the children are getting an education of some sorts. Big companies like Proctor and Gamble have made deals with the garbage collectors. They pay them a small amount to take back used shampoo and beauty product bottles. This helps the Zabbaleen a great deal and aids the big companies in fighting the trade in forged products.
The women and children sort through the trash with their bare hands (they might miss something precious if they wore gloves) so the rate of disease is high. Hepatitis is a real problem. After saying that, they have reached the level where almost all of their children are immunized with the standard Egyptian immunizations and the rate of death in infants has been greatly reduced.
I admire these people, they are moving on up, they live in terrible conditions but have progressed from shacks to brick homes, with water and electricity many of them have TVs in their homes and a few have even made it to university and are serving the community as lawyers and doctors. One guy, a second generation plastics recycler has even managed to build a villa and garden at the entrance to the slum.
There are levels within the slum, the bottom level being the people who don't have a truck to collect trash. They are the most poverty stricken and scavenge what they can from other peoples collections.
Then come the collectors, as I mentioned before the men of the family have their area of Cairo to collect from. In some areas they receive a small payment for collecting the trash, in other more affluent areas they actually have to pay for the pleasure. The rubbish is then taken home (actually home, many sort it in their houses) and sorted by the women and children. The sorted trash is then sold to people on the next level "the recyclers" the poorest of them being the paper recyclers. It then moves up and up to metal and plastics and finally to the middle men, who export the end products to companies all over the world. They basically run garbage city.
what amazes me more then anything is how adaptable these people are, they can make something from nothing. 30 families have now installed solar  panels on their roofs and heat their water through solar energy. They use the organic waste, that was once fed to the pigs in compost heaps, this is turned into methane gas and they cook with it on their stoves.
In the west we recycle 40 percent of our trash they manage 85!
Apart from this they are doing a great job for the city without actually being paid for it. A few years back the government wanted to put a stop to this for hygiene reasons and they contracted a few European waste management companies to take over the work. The Zabbaleen were at this time very unsure of their future. Thankfully the companies failed. The skips placed on street corners were stolen and the residents of Cairo, who were so used to having their trash collected at the door, couldn't adapt to taking it down the street. The Zabbaleen kept making their collections and slowly but surly the European companies disappeared.
Granted they concentrate on more affluent areas of the city. But they really are the only effective method of waste disposal in a city of millions.
The cull of the pigs affected them greatly. They discovered that goats simply don't eat enough organic waste. The street cats have started to eat the waste instead of rats, leading to a bit of a rodent problem in the slum. There are tales of rats so big they have actually killed cats.
I am looking into volunteering there right now and just felt the need to share the plight of these people.