The poorest poor

Going to the event “Towards a Culture of Sustainable Communities, Economies and Environment” brought me face to face with a totally alien group of people – waste pickers aka garbage collectors. It was an international meeting of activists dealing with issues of waste picking, people in poverty trying to make a living from collecting and recycling/sorting garbage.

I got to learn about it as it happens in South Africa, India and Egypt. In India banning them to go with their carriages on the streets dramatically worsened their situation. By privatizing garbage collection, it became property of the company collecting it so waster pickers lost their “raw material”. In Egypt, Christians used to eat pork meat. Because they ate it, they grew pigs and to feed them they were collecting garbage and feeding them with what was edible. So this is how they became garbage collectors and then they went on separating the garbage and become part of the recycling process. So in Egypt this is a job Christians do – from 60 to 90 %% depending on the slum. In the slum I was in, about 100 000 people were doing this. Then the swine flu came and the Egyptian government decided to kill all pigs in the country thinking those pigs can play a role in the further expansion of the flu. So they did! That had a devastating effect on the people from Mokattam as their main source of income and meat was gone. That deepened the poverty of the poorest people in Cairo. Now they are left with garbage collection/recycling, trying to make a living from that. If you’ve seen an industrial park with factories next to each other, then you can imagine how this neighborhood looks like. But instead of factory buildings you find buildings filled with trash, paper, glass, plastic, cardboard, cans, PVC etc. And at the upper floors of those same buildings or just next to them people are living. I was shocked by this image of this 2-3 years old child sitting in a trash bin and eating something from his hand … A lot of child labor in this “garbage” industry, other kids like them go to school and watch TV or play computer games after school. These were helping their family earn a living. In the slum I saw 3 recycling schools, one for boys on shampoo recipients and 2 for girls, one on e-waste and one on textile and recycled paper production. The concept of the schools was “learn and earn” …

Something I will remember for a long time is the people separating broken glass with bare hands and the recycling lines for plastic, the black, the blue, the green …
Our guide thinks that 2 things played a huge role in the development of this community. First was religion and the fact that they build a complex of 7 churches in the neighborhood which are very impressive, carved in the mountain and to which even rich people come in pilgrimage. The second was technology which allowed them to become more productive so earn more.

As an individual there is something very simple I can do to help this people – separate the trash when I put it into bags. One simple rule is to put the dry with dry and wet with wet, this way it will be much easier for them to separate it. Or even better, separate plastic, paper, metal, organic …

please watch this video to get a better view of what i am talking about.