by Jason Wilson
And if you listen to the older zabaleen, you start to think the younger generation has it pretty good. A stout, perpetually smiling mother of five who went by the name Um Michael told me, “When I was a kid there were no schools. There were not even any houses! We used to live in wood and tin one-level shacks right next to the pigs. We even used to go to the bathroom in the pigsty.” Um Michael was born in 1968 in Imbaba. She said life has gotten much easier for women in particular. “Twenty years ago we couldn’t even leave the house!” she said.
The zabaleen are Christians, but they’re still rural Egyptians and cling to the same conservative social practices as their Muslim counterparts; until this century, female circumcision was widespread in the Garbage City (it has nearly been eliminated thanks to NGO activism), and widespread adherence to traditional Egyptian codes regarding the protection of feminine virtue—observed by Muslims and Christians—prevented women from working outside the home in any capacity.
After puberty, women’s lives were restricted almost exclusively to domestic work and child-rearing. “There was no education at all for girls,” Um Michael said. Now forty-two, she is taking literacy classes at Saint Simon and has attained an eighth-grade reading level. She is immensely proud. In a living room scrawled with biblical graffiti, she fed me watermelon and pungent aged cheese that masked the smell of the streets outside. “I’m sorry the house is so dirty,” she said. “It’s not usually like this, but I’ve been studying so hard I haven’t had time to clean.”
Marianne Marzouk, Um Michael’s oldest daughter, lives a life that Um Michael never could’ve imagined as a young woman. Marianne has a university degree, speaks English, and recently got a loan to start her own business. It’ll just be a small clothing shop underneath her house, but her decision to quit her pharmacy job and strike out on her own shows that entrepreneurial spirit is not limited to zabaleen men alone. It’s also notable that Marianne, at twenty-two, is not already married with children; young men and women from the zabaleen community are waiting longer to marry and having fewer kids, allowing them to pursue their work and educational interests with greater freedom.
Many younger zabaleen have visited relatives in their ancestral farming villages, and they are happy to leave the clean air and green vistas behind to return to the Garbage City. “I went with my father once to Assiut,” Moussa told me. “There was nothing to do, and I asked my father if I could come home early. I hated it!” Naema came north to be married as a teenager and has never looked back. “In the village the men work all day under the burning sun for two dollars. They don’t own the land and there is no opportunity,” she explained. “Here the men can work as much or as little as they please. The amount of money they make depends on how hard they work.”
In so many ways, a brighter future has already arrived for the zabaleen. They have achieved most of the improvements in their community through their own cooperative labor and ingenuity. All they ask now is for the freedom to continue improving their community at their own pace without government interference in the form of aggressive regulations or, in the worst case, forced relocation.
I was surprised to learn that Ezzat supports Ahmed Nabil’s idea for transfer facilities where zabaleen can turn over organic waste to the multinationals and sort their recyclables outside the Garbage City. “If we can convince the government that we are the experts with garbage and recycling, and they help us upgrade our systems and our technology, then our living conditions will improve immensely,” he said. Rizeq Youssef said he is already planning to move his washing operation out of the Garbage Village once the government makes industrial land available. “There are many people looking to buy land,” Rizeq said. “I’m trying to invest in land too, because I need space to make my business bigger.”
Dr. Atwa Hussein, a soft-spoken Ministry of Environment employee with olive-green eyes and a neat desk, does not conform to my idea of a scheming bureaucrat. In his office near Cairo’s old city, he told me that the government has plans to construct two sorting facilities in the desert surrounding Cairo exactly like the one Ahmed Nabil described. “The biggest problem from the Ministry of Environment’s point of view is informal dumping and the accumulation of garbage,” he said. Informal dumps are more than eyesores—they catch on fire and pose a serious threat to adjacent areas, and they also exude methane and pollute the water table. Informal dumps are also factories for disease, especially when located close to overpopulated megacities like Cairo.
Dr. Hussein admitted that the government rushed into reckless contracts with the multinationals in 2003, and that new contracts should account for the zabaleen, who Dr. Hussein sees as Cairo’s most important waste management asset. His office is reworking waste management contracts to shift to a service-by-ton model—a shift they believe will lead to a cleaner Cairo and a more productive relationship between the government, the multinationals, and the zabaleen. “Service by route and pickup times does not incentivize the companies,” he explained. “A service-by-ton model will mean that companies will get paid to work as much as they can.” As for the zabaleen, “In the new contracts we will make it possible for the zabaleen to work officially as subcontractors for the multinationals. They will get paid a rate per ton of garbage they take to the sorting facility multiplied by the kilometers driven from the pickup point to the facility.”
Zabaleen collectors with whom I spoke said multinationals already allow them to dump organic waste in their trucks at night, and some even said the multinationals pay the wahaya to organize transfers. Where many parties see a hopelessly complex set of competing interests, Dr. Hussein sees an opportunity to expand and improve a system that’s already working. “In a perfect system,” he said, “zabaleen will be formally licensed as the owners of their recycling businesses. In such a system, they could make even more money.” Of course the government will benefit too. Dr. Hussein hopes the eradication of illegal dumping and the transition to environmental landfills will reduce future cleanup costs related to soil and water contamination.
Unlike the Ministry of Planning’s PowerPoint, Dr. Hussein’s plans are rational and plausible—especially because most of the cooperation he describes is already happening. The cooperation between multinationals and zabaleen just needs to be formalized to achieve maximum efficiency and to promise that the zabaleen get a fair cut.
While I was in Cairo, the Spirit of Youth Association was working with a Gates Foundation grant to explore possibilities for the zabaleen to integrate with the formal waste management sector. The organization surveyed eight hundred garbage collectors to ask if they wanted to be licensed, and the overwhelming response was yes. For all the zabaleen have been able to build out of trash, they’ve never been able to achieve real security. Formalization would legally sanction their operations and protect them from exploitation.
On the downside, formalizing the zabaleen and moving recycling workshops out of the Garbage City might erode the sturdy village culture that has allowed the community to thrive. In the Garbage City, the family is the best guarantee of security one can hope for; people still pay into collective pots to help friends get married or to handle medical emergencies, marriages are still arranged the old-fashioned way, and children take care of their parents as they grow old. An incredibly complex web of business relationships exists in the Garbage City, but family relationships are the anchors of existence. The zabaleen have always been more like farmers who barter and trade at the village market than factory workers and owners whose relationships and decisions are based entirely on financial transactions. But large export businesses like Rizeq Youssef’s are all the evidence one needs to conclude that things are changing fast. The village is getting bigger, and so are the ambitions of its entrepreneurial youth.
If any of the Garbage City elders fear a new era in which the younger zabaleen base their decisions on money instead of family, Riz will allay their concerns. While he invests in growing his business, he also invests in his family; Riz pays tuition fo
r all of his younger siblings, takes care of his grandmother, and even set his father up with a small shop in the neighborhood. He pays his workers more than they would earn with a multinational—more, in fact, than Riz made as a government teacher. Riz has never forgotten where he came from.
At about midnight one evening toward the end of my trip, I ride up to the Garbage City to meet a garbage collector who agreed to take me on his route. The taxi driver laughs when I ask him to take me to Manshiet Nasser.
“You’re kidding, aren’t you?” he asks.
When I get to the coffee shop where I arranged to meet the collector, he’s nowhere to be found. He probably got worried that I would attract too much attention from the police—the most common reason every collector but him refused to take me along. As luck would have it, I find Riz at an Internet café across the street. He joins me for a cup of anise-flavored yansoon.
I tell him that Moussa and Samaan have been fighting constantly and that Moussa threatened to give up recycling altogether and try to find work as a tour guide. I tell him how Moussa said, “I am tired of carrying my whole family.”
“It’s not true,” Riz says. “It’s just that he has changed and now he looks at them as simple. He just doesn’t see how much they do for him.” Riz takes a sip of his yansoon and leans in across the table.
“Believe me,” he says, “nobody does anything alone in this place.”
THOMAS SWICK
My Days with the Anti-Mafia
FROM The Missouri Review
SHE SAT READING in the garden of Monreale Cathedral, dwarfed by an ancient, leathery ficus. Except for the book, she fit the popular image of the young Siciliana: black hair, black dress, black shoes. She looked as if she’d come from Mass. I took a seat at the other end of the bench, from where I could make out the title of her book: The Portrait of a Lady. “That’s a good book,” I said.
“Scusi?” she asked, startled by my intrusion.
“Henry James is a wonderful writer.”
She smiled without looking at me. “I’m trying to improve my English,” she explained.
Her name was Rosalina. She had recently returned from Milan to look after her ailing mother in Palermo. “A lot of young people leave Sicily,” she said. Her brother lived in Milan. “We are not good citizens,” she said bluntly. “Do you know what I mean?”
I mentioned the litter, which, after only two days, had made an impression.
“Yes. We live in a kind of paradise. We have the sun and the sea. We think everything will take care of itself.”
I told her I had come to write about the anti-Mafia organization Addiopizzo.
“I think a lot of people don’t understand the importance of this organization,” she said.
“Perhaps the new generation will.”
She looked unconvinced. “People were more active in the ’80s,” she said.
My bed-and-breakfast sat at the end of a quiet street not far from the port. I had arrived on a cruise ship Friday evening and stayed onboard for the weekend excursions, the last of which was to Monreale. There was no sign outside the building, just the name SoleLuna among the names of tenants on the list by the door. I took the elevator to the third floor and rang the bell on the right. The door opened to reveal a woman in big round glasses with a tousle of salt-and-pepper hair. “I am Patrizia,” she said, pretty much exhausting her English, if not her warm welcome. Then she showed me to my room, where two single beds sat a little forlornly under a high ceiling.
Going out to explore, I found Palermo in a deep sleep. It was midafternoon on a Sunday in mid-August. Streets narrowed and darkened, at one point opening up to a sunlit intersection of stupendous decay. Abandoned buildings, sick with graffiti and boarded-up windows, seemed in competition to see which one could hold up the longest. I had read that some bombed-out neighborhoods in the city had never been restored after World War II, that Sicily was perennially ignored by Rome. But stumbling upon a decades-old dereliction—after two days of churches and palaces—was deeply alarming. This looked like Havana, not a major city of the European Union.
I crossed Via Vittorio Emanuele and plunged into another maze. A clutter of balconies blackened the airspace until I emerged into a small square filled with café umbrellas. An aproned waiter stepped from a door above which were the words Antica Focacceria S. Francesco. I knew the place from photographs, though they had always shown armed guards near the entrance, placed there because the owner had not only refused to pay protection money; he had gone to court and identified his extortionist. I imagined their absence was due to the drowsiness of August.
Via Merlo led to Piazza Marina, where the shuttered windows of old palazzos overlooked the dusty Giardino Garibaldi, its fence a rusting riot of nautical themes. It struck me as possibly the psychological heart of the city, the place where people would gather—if there were people. As I was admiring one of the ficuses in the garden, I came upon a plaque:
IN QUESTO LUOGO IL 12 MARZO 1909 ALLE ORE 20:45
PER PRODITORIA MANO MAFIOSA TACQUE LA VITA DI
Joe Petrosino
Lieutenant della Polizia di New York
LA CITTÀ RICORDA ED ONORA IL SACRIFICIO DELL’
INVESTIGATORE ITALO-AMERICANO
(IN THIS PLACE ON MARCH 12, 1909, AT 8:45 P.M.
THE HAND OF THE MAFIA SILENCED THE LIFE OF
Joe Petrosino
New York Police Lieutenant
THE CITY RECORDS AND HONORS THE SACRIFICE OF THIS
ITALIAN-AMERICAN INVESTIGATOR)
Not far away, an inscription on a wall, in Italian and German, identified the house as a place where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had stayed while on his visit to Palermo in 1787. It noted that his subsequent book, Italian Journey, had called Sicily “the key” to understanding Italy.
A little to the east, Piazza Kalsa showed some life. Two boys rode one bicycle back and forth, and a father pulled down his son’s pants so the boy could urinate into the bushes. Smoke from grills wafted over from surrounding streets. Next to the Church of Santa Teresa, a large hand-painted cart held a statue of the Virgin. The floor of the cart was covered on two sides with artificial roses, while the center sparkled with shards of broken glass. It seemed an odd decorative touch, but perhaps it doubled as a glittery warning to would-be thieves.
I ate my first breakfast at SoleLuna in the company of two young women from Genoa. They had come to the B&B on the recommendation of a friend. They hadn’t realized that it was a member of Addiopizzo, the organization that supports businesses which refuse to pay protection money (pizzo) to the Mafia. They were accidental ethical tourists.
Patrizia joined us, and I asked Francesca to inquire about her membership in Addiopizzo. She said she had never been asked to pay the pizzo; she had joined the organization out of a sense of solidarity. (The full name of her lodging is SoleLuna della Solidarietá Bed & Breakfast.) I wondered if she was afraid. “No, no, no,” she said dismissively, waving her hands and shaking her mop of salt-and-pepper hair. “No problem.”
Addiopizzo was launched in 2004, when a few recent university graduates were considering opening a bar in Palermo. Of course it would entail, as someone pointed out to them, paying protection money. At the time the Mafia extorted an estimated $200 million annually from Palermo businesses, with rates that ranged from about $300 for a bar to as much as $1,500 for a large hotel. Instead of starting their new business, the young men went out late at night and blitzed the city with stickers that read: “An entire people that pays the pizzo is a people without dignity.”
It was a courageous act. In 1991 Libero Grassi, the owner of a textile firm, had sent an open letter to the Giornale di Sicilia that began: “Dear Extortionist.” Nine months after it was published, he was killed. Other people who had stood up to the Mafia had had their factories torched, their stores ransacked, their pets killed. The retaliation of the so-called Honored Society is a well-documented phenomenon.
Support for Addiopizzo grew, so tha
t today it has over 460 members—ranging from the Accademia Siciliana Shiatsu to the Zsa Zsa Monamour discoteca—that refuse to pay protection money. Considering all the businesses in Palermo, this is still a modest number, however, and skeptics say that many people who claim they don’t pay the pizzo actually do. There is a store on Via Vittorio Emanuele that sells only products made by pizzo-free enterprises. Comitato Addiopizzo has a comprehensive website, giving information in most EU languages (including Finnish and Lithuanian), and it even has a travel arm, which offers anti-Mafia tours. I was signed up for one on Tuesday.
That first day, however, I needed to go shopping, as I hadn’t seen my suitcase since check-in in Miami. I walked the length of Via Roma, stopping in every men’s store I passed. As disheartening as the merchandise—shirts defaced with logos, zippers, bogus coats of arms, meaningless scraps of English—was the reception from the shop assistants. It wasn’t a surprise, though: in The Honoured Society: The Sicilian Mafia Observed, the British travel writer Norman Lewis wrote: “By comparison with the Italy of Rome—above all of Naples—Sicily is morose and withdrawn.” Lewis developed a great affection for the place but noted in a later book, In Sicily, that he rarely heard the sound of laughter there.
The shop assistants along Via Roma and Via Maqueda lived up to the stereotype. Granted, it was a stifling week in August, when anyone still working had a right to be irritable and pining for the beach. But at most of the places I went in Palermo—cafés, newsstands, gelaterias—I was met with an impassive stare that seemed the fixed facial expression of a people who had long ago learned to be suspicious of strangers.
