Zabaleen Plea to Egyptian Government: Don't Throw Away Our Livelihood
Cairo's trash-filled neighborhoods are the proud home of nearly 70,000 Coptic Christian zabaleen people and the majority of Egypt's pig population.
For decades, the zabaleen have earned a living off of collecting trash in Cairo's slums. In an average day, the zabaleen collect almost 6,000 tons of trash. Food scraps make up more than half of the trash and are fed to the pigs. Most of what remains is then recycled by zabaleen men.
Even though there are no reported cases of swine flu in Egypt — and you can't catch the virus from contact with pigs — the government has decided to slaughter all of Egypt's pigs as a preventative measure. Some think there there may be ulterior motives behind the mass slaughter as well. The New York Times reports that the government claims that getting rid of the pigs would force the zabaleen to clean up their neighborhoods.
The Egyptian government has promised to humanly butcher the swine according to Islamic law and freeze the meat. It is uncertain whether or not this meat will be consumed by Egypt's non-Muslim population. In compensation they will pay about $180 per pig.
Pigs importance goes beyond money for the zabaleen community. Along with the income their meat brings in they also play an important role as a cleaning crew of sorts, and the zabaleen feel targeted by the government. The Coptic Christian zabaleen are a minority in Egypt — 90 percent of the population is Muslim. Since it is against Islamic law to eat pigs, the zabaleen question whether or not the mass-slaughter in the name of swine flu is merely a disguise for religious motives.
More pigs are being slaughtered by the day and the zabaleen continue to plead with the government to not destroy their livelihoods. Ayman Saed told the BBC that when the government officers took his pigs it felt "as if they were killing me."
In a last ditch resort to save their pigs and their livelihoods, The New York Times reports that the zabaleen are now trying to get the government to let them keep their pigs on farms outside of they city. The zabaleen could cart out the organic waste to the farm and keep making a living off of collecting trash. So far, the government hasn't come around.
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This mass cull of pigs by the
This mass cull of pigs by the government of a country where the majority of the population is Muslim should come as no surprise. The sad reality of the situation is that the Egyptian government, with its stated goal of cleaning up the Zabbaleen neighborhoods, has added to the city's overall trash problem.
Hyper-urbanization has resulted in a city that cannot process and properly dispose of the mass amount of waste produced by its inhabitants. The Zabbaleen have filled this void and now the government has hampered their ability to do so with an irrational and panic-driven cull.
If the government honestly wants to improve the sanitary conditions of the Zabbaleen, it could address the lack of running water, sewage, and electricity in Manshiet Nasser. Providing these services would most likely improve the situation better than the effective confiscation of the Zabbaleens' livelihoods. Taking all this account, it seems the government is more concerned with the eradication of swine in Egypt to appease the majority Muslim population than it is for the welfare of the Zabbaleen.
Furthermore, the money the government has spent on compensating the Zabbaleen could have gone to addressing the lack of sanitary services. Ultimately, this hasty (and possibly prejudiced) action by the government harms more than it helps. Instead of addressing Cairo's trash problem with a practical solution that might help eliminate the poverty present in Manshiet Nasser, the government has destroyed the livelihoods of the Zabbaleen and harmed the entire city of Cairo.
Marina of the Zabbaleen
To learn more about the Zabbaleen community, please watch this film:
MARINA OF THE ZABBALEEN
A film by Engi Wassef
Marína of the Zabbaleen is a cinematic documentary that explores the world
of seven-year-old Marína in the Muqqattam garbage recycling village in
Cairo, Egypt. An impressionistic portrait of childhood and family, the film
also tells the story of the resourceful Zabbaleen, a Coptic Christian
community of recyclers whose entrepreneurial waste management system
produces the highest recycling rate in the world. No people has felt the
ramifications of the Swine Influenza pandemic more acutely than the
Zabbaleen, whose way of life was devastated by the government-ordered
eradication of the country¹s pig population earlier this spring.
For more information, please visit: http://www.MarinaTheMovie.com
now available on DVD.
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