The Best American Travel Writing 2012

by Jason Wilson

  Sergey tells us that Pripyat used to be the most beautiful, spacious city he ever saw. More roses grew there than anywhere else he ever knew. There were never any shortages, and you could get fine clothes, Czech-made shoes. It was a model of what communism was supposed to have been.

  It’s weirdly distressing to be here. As a human, it’s like staring down the barrel of our likely fate. We may wipe ourselves out with a nuclear holocaust, or with carbon and methane, or some other way we can’t yet conceive of. Or nature may do it for us. When it happens, trees may or may not mind. Cyanobacteria poisoned their own atmosphere two and a half billion years ago by releasing vast quantities of a gas that was poisonous to them—oxygen—and in the process created an atmosphere suited to higher forms of land life. Who knows what creatures may adapt to a high-carbon, high-methane atmosphere if we keep going the way we are? They may include us, or not.

  From Pripyat we drive on to the old power station itself. It’s a large area of vast concrete buildings. One of them is the stricken Reactor 4, some 200 feet tall, with a giant chimney still rising out of it. For almost twenty-five years it’s stood encased in a “sarcophagus” of cement, but the seal is far from perfect, and it leaks dangerously. We park 200 yards away to look at it but stay only a few minutes. A new steel sarcophagus is slowly being built; when finished, it will be the world’s largest movable structure.

  There are canals threading through the giant buildings, which provided water for the old coolant system, and in one of them the catfish have grown to prodigious sizes. We stop on a metal bridge and gaze down into the brown water. Suddenly the monsters rise to the surface, some of them a good 10 feet long, black, whiskered, curling around as they hunt for the bread people feed them.

  They’re not big because of radiation, Sergey insists. It’s just that they haven’t been fished for a quarter of a century.

  The whole area is like this: fecund, scary. Later Sergey takes us to an army barracks where some soldier friends of his keep a few wild pets. From the dark doorway of one of the sheds issues a terrific subterranean grunt, and a moment later, as if in a hurry, out trots another wild boar. It comes straight at the fence, presses against it with the weird, wet sucker of its long, long nose, then raises its bristly head and eyeballs me as if I’m something from another planet.

  In a pen next door there’s another forest sprite—the barsuk, a very close relative of our badger. When it comes out of its kennel, it runs up a woodpile, turns at the top, and proceeds to stare right into me with deeply strange eyes. Something in me seems to recognize something in it, and I feel a pang of longing. Is it for the deep forest, the pushcha? For the trees, the smell of autumn leaves, of mushrooms and mold? For the freedom to live our own way, far from society?

  Crouching and staring, the barsuk doesn’t move a muscle. It could be a stuffed animal, with eyes of glass. Or perhaps a new species, staring at the world with new eyes.

  ELLIOTT D. WOODS

  Garbage City

  FROM VQR

  PERCHED ATOP THE Moqattam Cliffs, where Pharaonic slaves cut limestone for the pyramids, the Monastery of Saint Simon and its accompanying cathedral boast a commanding view of Cairo. On a smog-free day, if you peek around the cliffs to the south, you can see clear to the Great Pyramids of Giza. Looking west, you have a fine view of more recent history; you can almost throw a rock at the Citadel of Salah Ed-Din or into the endless expanse of tombs that make up el-Arafa—the City of the Dead. On the western horizon, the Cairo Tower stands apart from the deceptively modern skyline of downtown. Right below your feet, largely invisible to the outside world, you’ll find Izbet Az-Zabaleen. The Garbage City, as it’s known in English, is a hive of entrepreneurial recyclers called zabaleen, literally “garbage people,” nestled at the edge of Manshiet Nasser, a teeming slum on Cairo’s eastern outskirts. A haze produced by the exhalations of some 2,500 black-market recycling workshops carpets a landscape of windowless brick high-rises and unpaved alleys piled high with garbage, the raw material of zabaleen industry. Rooftops serve as storage for stockpiles of plastic bottles, but also for herds of sheep and pigeon coops.

  Women cluster in the trash-lined dirt streets, sorting organic waste from recyclables. They hunt for aluminum, tin, steel, and sixteen types of plastic—from the kind used to make Ziploc Baggies to the crash-resistant stuff of car fenders. Bands of barefoot children play amid the waste. To the uninitiated, the scene appears downright infernal—like the fiery orc workshops of The Lord of the Rings. But looks are deceiving; the zabaleen swear they’re living better than ever.

  In sixty years, the zabaleen have gone from serfs to recycling entrepreneurs. Palaces have risen from the trash, bricks purchased bottle by bottle. There are real-life garbage kings in the village with informal businesses worth millions of dollars, but most of the 60,000 zabaleen in the Garbage City live modest lives defined by hard labor and strong family obligations. They and others like them throughout the city collect an estimated 4,500 tons of garbage from Cairo and Giza each day, and they claim to turn 80 percent of everything they collect into postwaste, salable materials. By comparison, Switzerland—which claims to have the best-organized recycling program in the world—recycles just over 50 percent of its waste.

  Almost all zabaleen are Coptic Christians whose families migrated to Cairo from Upper Egypt (the country’s agricultural south, called “upper” because it’s upstream from Cairo) in the 1940s, when government land reforms brought down a centuries-old feudal system and forced tens of thousands of peasant farmers into the cash economy. Like their Muslim compatriots, Coptic zabaleen remain deeply religious. Family homes are plastered with icons and biblical quotations, and the monastery above the Garbage City is the zabaleen’s private paradise. Hundreds of people stream up the hill in the afternoons to visit the gardens and breathe the comparatively clean air. For thousands of zabaleen women who rarely leave the Garbage City, Saint Simon is the only sanctuary from a life lived among the refuse of 16 million.

  Moussa Zikri and I are admiring the view from Saint Simon one afternoon when his phone rings. His face goes gray as he listens to the voice on the other end. When he hangs up, he asks politely if we can leave.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “There is a fire at my dad’s work,” he says. “I have to go there now.”

  We begin walking briskly downhill.

  “Do you want to run?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he says, and he takes off.

  I sprint too, past girls on their way up to the monastery, who giggle as we run by, past men hunched under ridiculously large sacks of garbage. We pick our way around donkey carts, squished rats, and puddles filled with sludge. Moussa flags down a car at the bottom of the hill. I walk the remaining distance, orienting myself toward a growing plume of black smoke. When I arrive, I find Moussa panting before a flaming heap of plastic bottles.

  “My materials!” he shrieks.

  Moussa’s father works as a guard at a parking lot where garbage collectors keep their trucks when they’re not working. Moussa, twenty-three, is the youngest of three brothers. He recently got into the bottle recycling business with the help of a $2,000 microloan, and he stockpiles his bottles in the parking lot, where his dad can keep an eye on them. Somehow a fire sprang up this afternoon, and it’s consuming weeks of work right before his eyes.

  Moussa’s little sister brings pails filled from a hose, and his brothers sling the water over the flames. The fire hisses and pops, mocking their efforts. Finally firemen arrive and unleash a blast of high-pressure water from their fire engine. In minutes Moussa’s mountain of bottles has been reduced to a steaming slag heap.

  Moussa and Samaan, his older brother and partner in the bottle recycling business, rush up the street to buy a bundle of giant woven sacks made from recycled grain bags to gather the surviving bottles. They salvage enough to load a Datsun pickup to three times my height, but Moussa remains inconsolable.

  “Today is a big misfortune for me,�
�� he says. “I probably lost eight hundred kilos today.” Moussa travels all over Cairo to buy bottles from garbage collectors spread throughout the city. He hoards bottles with his own capital, then turns a small profit by shredding them into chips and reselling them to an exporter.

  Moussa estimates the fire damages at about thirty dollars—a seventh of his monthly income. He’s sure the firemen would have arrived sooner if the address were somewhere other than the Garbage City. Manshiet Nasser is an “informal” development, in the language of Egypt’s Ministry of Planning; Moussa and his family are technically squatters, and they and the other zabaleen receive little in the way of government services.

  I follow Moussa upstairs to his living room after he and Samaan finish unloading the unburned stock into their basement. The door frames and walls are coated in black grime. A ceiling fan casts a choppy shadow over the room. Samaan’s one-year-old son, Abanoub, stumbles around behind his mother, screaming bloody murder. He was circumcised the day before and has developed an infection. Abanoub’s mother paces around frantically, clutching the phone and begging Samaan to call the doctor.

  Moussa’s two-year-old nephew waddles into the room with a Styrofoam plate of potato chips. He trips and spills the chips on the floor at Moussa’s feet.

  Moussa bends over to pick up a chip from the floor. He crunches it in his mouth, and a fleeting grin appears beneath his glazed eyes.

  “I’m going crazy,” he says.

  Today’s zabaleen were preceded by a group of garbage workers called the wahaya, or “oasis people,” who emigrated to Cairo from Saharan waterholes in the early twentieth century. The wahaya made money by gathering waste paper and selling it to public bathhouses in downtown Cairo, where it was used to heat bath water. The government eventually prohibited the use of wastepaper fuel in public baths, and the wahaya had to find a new business model.

  In came the first waves of Coptic farmers from Upper Egypt. They struck a deal with the wahaya: they would collect the garbage and use it to raise pigs, and the wahaya would keep the rights to garbage collection routes and monthly collection fees charged to residents. The wahaya would provide each Copt family with a pigsty and two pigs to get them started, and the Copts could buy out their pigsties over time.

  In the 1940s, the first zabaleen neighborhoods sprouted in Torah and Imbaba, two greater Cairo areas that were once on the outskirts of the city but have since been enveloped in the city’s endless sprawl. The Giza Governorate forced the zabaleen out of Imbaba in the seventies and many families relocated to the arid and inhospitable desert below the Moqattam Cliffs.

  The wahaya no longer collect garbage, but they guard their roles as middlemen between the trash and the profits. They still control the garbage collection routes and take a three-fifths cut of all collection fees. The tradeoff between zabaleen and wahaya remains essentially the same: zabaleen families keep all the garbage they want; only now, instead of feeding it to pigs, they mine it for recyclable materials.

  Sherif, the collector who worked my building with his brother and nephew in May and June 2010, paid the wahaya with rights to my neighborhood about sixty cents out of the dollar he collected monthly from each of the 250 apartments on his route. Sherif’s three-man team thus earned around $100 per month from collecting six hours a day, six days a week. The bulk of their monthly income came from selling plastic bottles to shredders like Moussa.

  In 1983 the Cairo and Giza Cleansing and Beautification Authorities (CCBA, GCBA) divvied up collection routes between the biggest wahaya families and gave them legal recognition, but the zabaleen missed out on the deal. Their livelihood remains technically illegal, and they often pay petty bribes to street cops to avoid fines for using donkey carts in the city and driving trucks overloaded with garbage. Rather than draw more attention to their community by agitating for a more equitable system, the zabaleen try to fly below the radar.

  In June 2009 the zabaleen took the biggest hit to their livelihood in history: in a panic over the spread of H1N1, swine flu, which had yet to reach Egypt, the government slaughtered 300,000 pigs belonging to zabaleen families. The pig cull struck the zabaleen as a personal assault. Many Copts believe they are the de facto scapegoats whenever Egypt runs into problems, and they suspect the government of killing the pigs to appease Muslims whipped into a frenzy by the H1N1 scare.

  Pig farming had been the core of the zabaleen’s business since they began their relationship with the wahaya in the 1940s. The zabaleen were so well known for their pigs that many Cairenes referred to their neighborhoods as zarayyib—pigsties. The pigs were a vital organ in the system; they sorted organic garbage from the recyclable materials with their mouths, allowing the zabaleen to profit from the garbage in three ways: by selling pork to fellow Christians at market, by selling truckloads of manure to rural farmers as fertilizer, and by selling recyclable materials to workshops in the Garbage City. Families took fattened pigs to market every six months, and a dozen hogs could generate as much as $1,500 of supplemental income. “The use of pigs was very clever,” explained Nicole Assad, who has volunteered in the Garbage City for nearly thirty years with the Association for the Protection of the Environment (APE). “The pig is the only animal we know that can consume such quantities of organic garbage—thirty-two kilos a day.” When the pigs vanished, it was as if the zabaleen machine suddenly had to run without an engine.

  A forty-three-year-old mother of six named Naema—who, like many women in the Garbage City, spends her days sorting the garbage her husband brings home at night—told me that the worst consequence of the pig slaughter is that they can no longer handle as much trash. “We used to have two hundred pigs, and now the pigsty is overflowing with trash. We can’t keep up.” Absent hundreds of voracious mouths, the sorting process takes much longer—and produces fewer recyclables. “We want the pigs back,” another woman told me. “It was a perfect system: they ate the garbage, and we ate them.”

  As they adapt to a hog-free world, the zabaleen have to contend with another roadblock: the arrival of multinational waste management consortiums. In 2003, in an attempt to modernize the capital, the Egyptian government invited corporations to bid on multimillion-dollar contracts for the collection and disposal of Cairo’s garbage. When green-suited waste workers hit the streets with their compaction trucks and dumpsters, the zabaleen feared their days were numbered.

  But Cairo itself seemed to come to their defense. Much of the city—from the ancient Fatimid arcades to the modern slums—rose around narrow alleys meant for foot traffic and donkey carts, not for cars or trash trucks. Even in modern Zamalek, where I stayed, most streets allow for the passage of only a single car between rows of cars parked two-deep along the sidewalks. On the wider axes, paralytic traffic makes a grueling slog out of the shortest journeys. Before long the multinationals were up to their ears in trash, utterly overwhelmed by Cairo’s garbage.

  Logistics were not the multinationals’ only problem. They were also unable to convince Cairenes—accustomed to leaving their trash at their apartment doors for the zabal—to carry their trash bags down to dumpsters each day. In many locations where residents brought trash out to curbside bins, corporate garbage trucks failed to pick it up frequently enough, and the dumpsters overflowed. Dumpsters became feeding troughs for cats, dogs, rats, and weasels. The populace grew indignant.

  Cairenes were also infuriated by the government’s decision to charge them for trash collection directly on their utility bills. Suddenly they were paying twice—one payment to the multinationals, and another payment at the door for the people who actually collected the trash: the zabaleen.

  To learn how multinationals were coping with their dilemma, I make an appointment with Ahmed Nabil, general manager of International Environmental Services (IES), in his glass-and-steel office next to the American embassy. IES won a $6.5 million annual contract to collect waste from Giza, but after six years on the ground the company still pays huge sums in fines for repeatedly failing to
empty dumpsters on time. The fines have hobbled IES and prevented them from expanding their fleet or offering more jobs to the city’s legions of unemployed. (Nabil would not disclose a figure, but Luigi Pirandello—the Italian manager of another multinational firm called AMA Egypt—told me his company pays 7 percent of its revenue in fines.)

  After bemoaning myriad forms of GCBA harassment and waxing nostalgic about his sojourn in Houston as a young engineer, Nabil—wiry, with a thin silver mustache and a raspy smoker’s voice—turns to the zabaleen. He sips his double espresso and tamps out his fifth cigarette, folding the filter neatly over the ember and pressing down with his thumb. “Of course the zabaleen are part of the plan,” he says. “From the social point of view, we have a responsibility to keep them working, and from the point of view of experience, they can do what no one else can. The question now is how should they be integrated?”

  When the multinationals first arrived, they attempted to hire zabaleen as collectors at about $60 a month, the going rate at the time for manual labor in Cairo. The zabaleen never showed much interest, partly because working for them would be seen as betrayal of the community—like a scab breaking a strike line—but more because the zabaleen recoil at the idea of simple wage labor.

  “The zabaleen are business people in their own right,” explained Bertie Shaker, a researcher with CID Consulting, a Copt-owned firm that has advised the government and the multinationals. “They don’t want to be beholden to corporate interests, or to turn over the methods and expertise they’ve spent generations developing in exchange for a wage.”