Garbage City and the Zabaleen

Last week we went to “Garbage City.” Collecting garbage is a business in Cairo. Garbage collectors make a living by selling the recyclables they find in the trash. Over the past century, the Zabaleen have established themselves as the city’s garabge collectors. The Zabaleen used to be a nomadic tribe of Christians, who, unlike Muslims, could keep domesticated pigs. When several members of the tribe settled in Cairo, they found that they were better suited for collecting trash than the Muslims doing so at the time, because their pigs could dispose of the organic waste as they sorted through it for recyclables. Now the Zabaleen are the city’s garbage collectors. Like the Mafia, different areas in Cairo are controlled by different families, and there are turf wars when groups collect outside of their territory. With donations from upper class Christian communities in the suburbs around Cairo, a church was built in a huge natural cave in the Zabaleen neighborhood. The Zabaleen are often involved in fights with Muslims from other poor neighborhoods. Largely uneducated and living in absolute squalor and filth, the Zabaleen are scrappy street fighters, sometimes identified by cross tattoos on their arms.

I’m still coming to terms with the images from our visit. Trash was in piles two to three stories high—inside and outside. People of all ages sat in repulsive piles of garbage, sorting out plastic and cardboard as millions of insects swarmed around them. Children hopped along trash piles spilling in and out of houses, laughing and coughing. And despite these conditions, people seemed more happy and friendly here than any area we had visited thus far. I think a lot of it can be attributed to their excitement at seeing foreigners in a place that seldom receives visitors of any kind.

Most of all, it was striking to see yellowing posters of Jesus and the Virgin Mary hanging on peeling wallpaper above piles of garbage when all my life their pictures have been in elaborate churches surrounded by average American neighborhoods that would appear as absolutely fantastical palaces to the Zabaleen.

Mosques, some Churches, and a Synagogue

For me, one of the most significant parts of this trip has been observing the religious culture of Cairo.

Muslims are by far the majority; Cairo is known as the city of a thousand minarets because there are so many mosques. Christians compose a small but potent minority (I’ve heard 7-10% of the population). Jews are few and far between. Egypt has a rich history of varying religious movements, and Cairo presents a physical record of this religious transition. There are hundreds of beautiful mosques and churches, each with a story.

Many of the stories I’ve heard as we’ve visited these sites are charged with polemic. At the first church we visited, our Christian guide explained all the subterfuge that the church’s founder had to overcome from a conniving Rabbi turned Muslim. Another day, at a Shiite mosque with a Sunni guide, we heard stories of the Shiite founder’s mental illness and the Shiites current delusional practices of reverence. The histories of these places of worship have been rewritten to forward the religious beliefs of those telling the stories. I don’t doubt that there is some truth in the stories we heard, but almost always the presentation concluded in a way that rendered the beliefs of “the other” as virtually unpalatable.

In America, social pressure often pushes people (and conversation) towards secularism rather than religion. In Cairo, exactly the opposite is true. It seems like people are programmed to wax religious in every aspect of life. It’s jarring to go from a country where it feels like a social risk to share your beliefs, to a country where people reference God in virtually every conversation. People even brand themselves. Many Muslims have a large bruise on their forehead from frequent prayer. To some it is a badge of piety. And most Christians here tattoo small crosses on their wrists.

I’ve been asking about Egyptians’ views on recent tensions between Muslims and Christians a lot. I’m still processing through all the responses I’ve been receiving, but hopefully that will be a blog post of it’s own soon.

Fun in the Sun

The Sufis

Tonight I had the opportunity to listen to a group of Sufi musicians in a small venue not far from our apartment. Sufis seek God through ritualistic music and dancing. Their belief system is inherited from Islam, but they often focus on mysticism more than traditional Muslim communities. Warm, yellow light hung low in the incense-thick air, disappearing into the dark corners of the ceiling. The intricate patterns on the rich red rugs snaked beneath the six Sufi musicians against the wall. It was hot, but it felt right to be sweating as I listened to the tribal rhythm of the drums and the airy whistle of the Nay flute. One Sufi would lead each song, drawing their voice into the room between flourishes from the flute. Then with whirling and excited accents from the drums, the whole group would join in with strong voices, reverberating through the small chamber. Around the room, those listening had all contracted the rhythm of the Sufis, swaying, dancing, or clapping. There was connection—and communication that supersedes verbal exchange.

Earlier in the week I attended a performance of traditional Arabic music at the Cairo Opera. Up in the back of the highest balcony, compulsory tie from the ticket box around my neck, I looked down on the National Symphony and the elite Cairenes nestled on the floor before them. As the lush swell of strings filled the room, chests around the room swelled with pride. The well educated and powerful leaned forward in their seats and rocked with the coursing symphony, tapping the dancing rhythms of the violins and Qanun.

And then there was a moment this morning: I sat in a drum circle with five boys at Ana Al-Masry, an NGO that serves street children in Cairo. This week has been the first time many of these boys have experienced structured musical education. As we locked into rhythm, I watched them engage emotionally in the beat we had finally learned. The walls pulsed with the booming of the drums, and the music became the most tangible thing in the room.

The Sufis are on to something. Music is spiritual. As humans, we need purpose beyond survival, we find beauty in sunsets, and we experience stimulus through music that goes beyond and outside of all our other daily experiences. Music has always been an escape for me. There’s movement in music that you can surrender to, you abandon control and let it take you where it will. There are things that need to be communicated and explored, and when words fail, music exceeds expectations. This is human. In many ways, the Rock music that has been my escape—driving bass, fast, hard drums, and strident electric guitar—is just a modern adaptation of the writhing pulse of the Sufi music that has inherited the tribal beats of ancient people. And that beat unlocked something in the children at Ana Al-Masry this morning.

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One of the differences I’ve noticed between Western and Eastern music is the way a song is ended. In Western music, there’s often a grandiose swell as the music slows and the musicians linger on each note. In the Eastern music I’ve experienced so far, the music frequently speeds up as the end approaches, then everything abruptly stops.

As the Sufi musicians approached the end of their songs, volume and tempo would frantically increase until the room sounded like it would wrench apart at any minute, then suddenly there was silence… and a new song would softly begin. It seems fitting that the music of Egypt would transition like that. In the streets of Cairo, outside the sweaty building housing the Sufi musicians, is a society just rounding such a transition. The hot pressure of unrest rose until a surging revolution released it. And now the city seems to be cooling, though maybe only temporarily, as a new era for Egypt begins.

Al-Kiyaan

“Together, let’s make disability a source of energy”

We’re following a veiled woman in all black as she weaves through the streets of a quiet neighborhood in the center of Cairo. She carries a blind boy in her arms, walking quickly as she passes groups of men chatting beneath shop awnings, mechanics wiping grease from their hands, a butcher hanging red and white limbs in front of his shop. Here, away from tourist areas, our group stops traffic as people stop to stare. We don’t know the woman in black, but it’s a good bet she’s heading to the Al-Kiyaan building, the HQ of a Non-Governmental Organization that serves disabled Egyptian children and their families. We reach the gate at the same time as the woman and her child, and she disappears into the building as we are greeted by Dr. Ayman Tantawi, the center’s director.

People like Dr. Tantawi are the reason not-for-profits succeed. Intelligent, swelling with passion, infinitely energized and cheerful, Dr. Tantawi enthusiastically explained the organization’s history and vision, and began the dialogue of our cooperation.

Dialogue of our cooperation? This is a man who has tirelessly poured his time and energy into Al-Kiyaan since it’s inception, helping an exponentially increasing number of disabled children and their families as the organization has grown. I was fully prepared to sit down, take orders, and learn from his experience. But Dr. Tantawi instead invited us to share our ideas, experiences, and theories about charity work and working with the disabled specifically. With complete humility he asked us to help design programming and to give a presentation to his staff about the way we address disabilities in the United States.

As the dialogue began, I realized we really could contribute. Between the eleven of us traveling with DukeEngage, there is a tremendous amount of experience working with various volunteer organizations, a majority of which with disadvantaged or disabled children.

I’m so humbled that people like Dr. Tantawi, and many of the other coordinators at the various NGO’s we visited, want to be in this dialogue on service with us. The more I see of their organizations at work— with their passionate and well-educated volunteers and their programs seamlessly integrated into their communities—the more I am excited to learn from them. By sharing the strengths and weaknesses we’ve observed throughout our respective experiences, Eyptian and American, we’re helping each other to serve our communities more effectively than it would ever have been possible to do alone.

Orphanage Visit

Yesterday we visited the Al-Firhaan Orphanage. I emerged with marker all over my shirt and three different colors of playdoh stuffed under my finger nails, but it was a blast! We probably had more fun than the kids. At the end of our visit, a spontaneous Egyptian dance party erupted. As I watched the Muslim girls, who are my age and work at the orphanage, dance and play with the kids, I felt I fully experienced their humanity for the first time. The distance produced by our vast cultural differences broke down among the children as they shed their reservations. As corny as it sounds, I could see the "inner child" inside each of these girls, and it reminded me of my own.

Easing into the Flow of Cairo