Living in Garbage City

Our group of ten arrived in Cairo in the middle of the night.

As soon as we found our bags and stepped outside the airport, people started welcoming us. “Welcome to Egypt!”

Driving from the airport to our accommodations in a church, I tried to absorb everything around me, all the people and passing scenes.

New language. New smells. New faces. New culture.

We are staying in a church called the Cave Church in an area of Cairo called Garbage City. The names perfectly describe the things— the church is literally in a cave with an arena that seats 20,000 people and the city is literally filled with garbage.

The people who live in Garbage City are primarily Christians. We learned that in Egypt the Christians are sometimes looked at as a lower citizen. So one of their roles in Cairo is to collect, organize and either recycle or burn the garbage.

The streets are overflowing with the trash that the people have collected. You can taste the smell.

Everywhere you look there are people carrying and sorting garbage. The men drive trucks piled so high with trash that we saw one get stuck, the garbage not fitting through a tall archway. They carry bags twice as big as them, flies pouring out of the containers, swarming the streets. The women can be seen in the allies sorting through and organizing the debris. And the children run free, playing in their garbage playground.

I’m having a hard time thinking of how to describe this city, these people. As a westerner coming into their world, it would be easy to only see the difficulties. To see their life as hard and this place as dirty. And both of those are true. But that’s not the end of who these people are or what this place is.

I took a picture of a little girl, curly hair, bright eyes, standing in the doorway of her home in the ally, trash at her feet. I smiled at her after shaking her little hand and kept walking. Moments later a women came running up to me, with her little girl. She started smoothing the girl’s hair and tucking in her shirt, frantically talking in Arabic. Our translator explained that she would like me to delete the picture. She was upset and embarrassed that I had taken a picture of her daughter, dirty, shirt untucked. Even though it was not my intension at all to exploit this child or her family, she felt exploited.

She wants her family to be seen as people, not subjects of a westerner’s picture. She has pride and dignity. And I get that.

These people are beautiful. They have beauty that transcends the garbage surrounding them. They have fun personalities and amazing smiles and have welcomed us openly. There are Christians and muslims living and working side by side. To be a Christian in such a muslim dominant society is beyond difficult. But they are living out their faith as they are called, right where they live.

They have challenged me to open up my eyes and see people how the Lord sees people. Not dirty and lower, not with irrevocable differences. But as his perfect children that he sees and loves individually.

It has been an honor to live in Garbage City and be introduced to this beautiful country.