The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (24 page)

Sayyid eventually found work as an assistant to a
zabal
named Salama, whose life in garbage was also inspired by an abundance of women. In Salama's case, there was only a single wife, but she gave birth to eight daughters and no sons. “He didn't do anything his whole life other than prepare his daughters for marriage,” Aiman, the husband of Salama's oldest daughter, told me once. Aiman runs a small recycling business, and like many
zabaleen
he has a nickname: Aiman the Cat. “Other people build buildings,” Aiman the Cat said of his father-in-law. “He built daughters.” When Salama died and there was no son to pick up his route, it was loaned to Sayyid. He's allowed to collect the trash, but he has to pick out all paper, plastic, glass, and other resellable commodities and give them to Aiman the Cat.

They have no formal contract, but it doesn't matter, because Cairo's waste collection is shaped by tradition, not by laws and planning. The system began in the early 1900s, when a group of migrants arrived from Dakhla, a remote oasis in Egypt's Western Desert. They became known as
wahiya
—“people of the oasis”—and they paid Cairo building owners for the right to pick up garbage and charge fees to tenants. In those days, much of the garbage was flammable, and the
wahiya
used it as fuel for street carts that made
ful
, the fried beans that are a staple in Egypt.

Inevitably, Cairo's population grew at a rate that upset the delicate balance between trash and beans. In the thirties and forties, a new wave of migrants began to come from Asyut, in Upper Egypt. They were Coptic Christians, which meant that they could raise pigs that ate organic garbage. The Christians subcontracted from the Muslim
wahiya
, who evolved into middlemen, managing access and collecting fees. The actual hauling and sorting was done by the Christians, who became known as
zabaleen
, and who made much of their income by selling pork, mostly to tourist hotels. The government played no role in establishing this system, which worked remarkably well. Social scientists often cite it as a success story among developing-world megacities, and in 2006 an article in
Habitat International
described it as “one of the world's most efficient resource recovery” systems. It was estimated that the
zabaleen
recycled roughly 80 percent of the waste that they collected.

But the system became a victim of dysfunctional national politics under the regime of Hosni Mubarak. In 2009, during the worldwide epidemic of H1N1 swine flu, the Ministry of Agriculture decreed that all Egyptian pigs had to be killed. There was no evidence that pigs were spreading the disease, but the government went ahead and slaughtered as many as 300,000 animals. Some Egyptians believe that the decision was driven by a desire to appease Islamists, who had become outspoken critics of the regime, and supposedly hated pigs even more than they hated Mubarak. But the policy backfired, with hundreds of furious
zabaleen
taking part in protests. They also started tossing organic waste into the streets, because it had no value without pigs. The declining hygiene of the capital and the unrest of the
zabaleen
were part of the general unhappiness that culminated in the revolution, in January 2011.

For Sayyid, none of this—the people of the oasis, the wandering pig-raisers, the Exodus-style slaughter carried out by a dying regime—is exotic or unusual. He doesn't believe that there's anything particularly complex about the relationships he has to negotiate in order to gain access to trash. In Zamalek, he collects from 27 buildings, which are subcontracted from 7 individuals. One is Aiman the Cat, the
zabal
, who is Christian, and the others are Muslim
wahiya
who are known by nicknames like the Beast and the Fox. The Fox allows Sayyid to handle seven buildings; the Beast grants him one. Another
wahi
has been dead for a decade, but his son, a government clerk, retains rights to the trash, so he subcontracts to Sayyid. There's also a dead
wahi
who left a widow, so Sayyid is obligated to send her £E100—about $14—a month. Periodically he checks to see if the widow is still alive, but he wouldn't dream of cutting her off, out of respect for the sacred link between women and garbage.

He keeps track of all this, and the monthly tips of more than 400 residents, by memory. And he's constantly acquiring peripheral information that can be leveraged into baksheesh. A few years ago, Sayyid was hauling trash late at night when he saw the daughter of a doorman returning from university with a boy. Believing that they were alone, they kissed. “Since I've eaten with her father and mother, I didn't like what I saw,” Sayyid told me. “So I told the father.” Undoubtedly Sayyid thought that the doorman's gratitude would be of some benefit to him, but this was a miscalculation. The daughter denied everything, and the doorman barred Sayyid from collecting the building's trash. At that point, Sayyid called upon the owner of H Freedom and the man at the local bread kiosk for help, but their intercession only convinced the doorman that the story was spreading. He gave the garbage rights to another
zabal
, and now Sayyid says that he should have minded his own business.

It's rare for
zabaleen
to do hard labor into middle age, and Sayyid, who is 40, has chronic pain in his back and his knees. He expects that within the next decade he'll be unable to continue, but he doesn't know what to do next—he often describes himself as stupid, and fit only for the work of a donkey. But in truth his job requires him to be observant and perceptive, and he must interact with the full range of Egyptian society. In particular, he has to be sensitive toward Christians, who dominate the industry. The first time I accompanied him to his neighborhood to watch a soccer match at another
zabal
's home, Sayyid prepped me with a list of things that I should and shouldn't say, so that I wouldn't offend his Christian sensibilities.

One evening Sayyid stopped by my apartment to chat, and my wife, Leslie, and I began talking about a rich and notoriously stingy woman in the neighborhood. She's middle-aged and well educated, but she never married, and I asked Sayyid why.

“There's a proverb,” he said. “‘If you befriend a monkey for his money, then tomorrow the money will be gone, but the monkey will still be a monkey.' That's what it was like with her. Nobody wanted to marry her.”

I remarked that the woman is also obese, but Sayyid shook his head. “She used to be pretty,” he said. “I've seen pictures of her from fifteen or twenty years ago. She looked so different. Beautiful!”

“Where did you see the pictures?”

“In the garbage,” he said. “She threw them away.”

I asked why he thought she had done that.

“Maybe she didn't want to remember those times,” he said quietly. “Maybe the pictures made her sad.”

Sayyid himself married late by Egyptian standards. When he was 29, he arranged with some neighbors to marry their cousin, an 18-year-old named Wahiba. She came from a village outside Aswan, in Upper Egypt, and she was educated, having attended a trade school after high school. She moved to Cairo to be with Sayyid, and they soon had two sons and then a daughter.

On the seventh day after the daughter's birth, Sayyid invited Leslie and me to his home for the traditional celebration that's called the
sebou
. We took a cab and then a microbus out to Ard al-Liwa, an area in northern Cairo that includes a number of
ashwa'iyat
, or “informal” settlements—illegally built slums. Sayyid's
ashwa'iyat
is dominated by garbage collectors, and we walked through narrow alleyways full of trash that was in the process of being hand-sorted. There were bags of glass bottles, stacks of old rags, pallets of crushed plastic, and piles of rotting vegetables that would be used as goat feed. In one spot, a man had picked dozens of pieces of bread from the garbage and laid them out to dry; eventually they would be fed to water buffalo. Everywhere we walked, we could hear rats rustling through trash. But the homes were made of concrete and brick, and were relatively well constructed. This is generally true of Cairo, where about two thirds of the population lives in
ashwa'iyat
. David Sims, an urban planner who is the author of
Understanding Cairo
, has pointed out that the capital's slums have a functionality and permanence that's rare in many parts of the developing world.

Before visiting Sayyid's home, I had had the notion that it would be furnished largely with things from the garbage. In Zamalek, he's always showing me discarded objects that still have value, and once he told me that the bread I'd tossed out a day earlier had been perfectly good—he'd taken it out of my trash and used it to make sandwiches for some friends at H Freedom. So I was surprised to find that virtually everything in his two-story apartment was new, and for the first time I realized how effective Sayyid had been at inspiring tips. He usually earned nearly $500 a month, which was about twice the average household income in Cairo, and his apartment had cost more than $30,000. He had two televisions, and his couches were still wrapped in factory plastic. A computer was being installed for the eldest son, Zizou.

When we entered, we were greeted by Wahiba, who was another surprise. She was strikingly pretty, with fair skin and a heart-shaped face, and she wore blue eye shadow and dark eyeliner. She was slender, and dressed in a long white gown embroidered with beads; it was hard to believe that she had given birth to her third child only a week earlier. She greeted us warmly, and we chatted for a few minutes, and then she politely excused herself. A few minutes later, she returned in a niqab, the full head covering that is worn by conservative Muslims.

And after that I never saw her face again. In the next couple of years, I visited Sayyid's home on a number of occasions, but Wahiba usually stayed out of sight. She would remain in the kitchen, behind a closed door, making tea or dinner, which would be served to me by Sayyid or one of the children. The few times that I caught a glimpse of Wahiba, she was wearing the niqab, and we never had another conversation. I realized that I had caught her unaware at our initial meeting, and it felt strange to remember that first and only glimpse. The more I got to know Sayyid, the less I felt I knew his wife, and the more mysterious she became.

Not long after the
sebou
, tensions appeared in the marriage. Sayyid had always worked long hours in Zamalek, but now he seemed to delay going home, often returning as late as midnight. He complained that he was fighting with Wahiba, usually about money. Sometimes he mentioned the possibility of divorce, which has little stigma for male Muslims in Egypt. One of Sayyid's older brothers had recently divorced for the second time and now was searching for a third wife. “You keep one for a while and then you change,” the brother had told me when we met at the
sebou
. “It's like changing a tire on a car.”

Sayyid and most of his siblings were born in Cairo, but like many residents of the capital they maintain strong links to their ancestral village, which is the source of most ideas about family. In Sayyid's extended family, most women wear the niqab, but the reason seems to be more cultural than strictly religious. It's a point of pride and possession for the men—Sayyid says that his wife wears it because she's beautiful, and if she shows her face in the street she'll be coveted by strangers and harassed. And other traditions serve to control women in more explicit ways. One evening Sayyid and I were watching my twin daughters play in the garden, and he asked casually if I planned to have them circumcised. I looked at the girls—they were all of three years old—and said no, this wasn't something we intended to do. The majority of Egyptian women have undergone the surgery, which opponents describe as genital mutilation. Since 2008 it's been illegal, but many people continue to have it performed on daughters, usually when they're between the ages of nine and twelve. In Egypt, Islamists are the biggest supporters of the procedure, which, among other effects, makes intercourse less pleasurable for a woman. But in fact this tradition is not mentioned in the Koran, and Muslims in most parts of the world don't practice it. Originally it was a tribal custom native to many parts of Africa.

I asked Sayyid if he planned to have the surgery performed on his daughter, and he nodded. “Otherwise, women are crazy for
dakar
,” he said, using a word that means “male.” “They'll be running around outside the house, chasing men.”

For traditionally minded Egyptians, this is a common view: desire should be limited to males, who do what they can to heighten it. All those sex drugs in the garbage of Zamalek aren't an anomaly—in Egypt, I've had a number of casual conversations in which the topic turns to sex, and a man reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pill, to show that he's prepared. Usually it's some version of Viagra, but for Sayyid's class the drug of choice is often tramadol, a prescription painkiller. Cheap versions are manufactured in China and India, and in 2012 the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that there were 5 billion tramadol pills in Egypt, a staggering number in a country of 84 million.

Many of the
zabaleen
I know use the stuff. The pills are available on the street for 30 or 40 cents, and they take the edge off the fatigue and pain of a hard day's work. They are also addictive; in America, where the abuse of tramadol is growing, its status has recently been upgraded to that of a controlled substance. Last year, a
zabal
I know asked me for advice about how to quit. He looked awful: he was sweating heavily and his eyes were darting here and there. I knew that he was a devout Christian, so I did my best and came up with two recommendations: pray very hard, and drink a lot of caffeine. I suppose I wasn't a total hypocrite—I do one of these things religiously—but I felt helpless. I was relieved when, a month later, the
zabal
told me he'd been able to kick the habit.