How can I ever forget the Zabaleen area in Cairo. Never, it's forever etched in my mind. A place that reeks of trash because it is a place where the trash of almost the whole of Cairo is brought. The trash pickup system in Cairo is sorely inadequate. Zabaleens are people who, for a fee, will come to your apartment to pick up your trash. These are private people with no company ties. They then take your trash and bring it home to the Muqqatam hills where they'll sort the trash, sell the recyclables and feed the food scraps to their animals and incinerate the rest. The people doing this kind of work are all Coptic Christians who otherwise will be unemployed. This is their livelihood. They eat, sleep trash and the place smells of one gigantic trash dump. This place has been written up a lot and it seems it is the most ecological way of disposing trash because they recover as much as 80 % of the recyclables. I had not only wanted to see the pyramids, I wanted to see this place as well, 'garbage city' as Egyptians call it.
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