"Places not to go"

Recently I came across a list of "places NOT to travel." In tongue-in-cheek humor, this travel guide mentioned "Garbage City" in Cairo. In 2008 I had the privilege of visiting Garbage City, a slum populated by minority Coptic Christians, or zaballeen, who work as garbage collectors. This morning while packing in my hotel to head to Tunis, Tunisia, I caught the last few minutes of a documentary, "Garbage Dreams," which I've linked below. Apparently a multinational corporation has begun managing garbage collection, taking away the livelihood for many of these minority Egyptians.

Cairo is a labyrinth of smaller cities, or enclaves, like the City of the Dead, a sprawling four-mile cemetery where thousands of impoverished Egyptians live and work among the tombs. Another of these enclaves, Manshiyet Nasser, popularly called “garbage city”, is located in the Muqattam hills in east Cairo. It is a district of dark, brick tenements overflowing with Cairo’s trash, collected and processed by minority Coptic Christians and the pigs they raise. Cairo is a city of stark contrasts, and the Egyptian state’s relations with its Coptic Christian minority and its Muslim majority is only one of them. The Copts in Egypt were not always a minority living as pig-farmers in slums. Many Copts consider their ancestors to be the “original Egyptians”, as the word Copt is derived from the Greek word Aigyptos (Egyptian). Until the Muslim conquest of Egypt in the seventh century, Copt and Egyptian were synonymous, and the Arabic word for inhabitants of the Nile Valley was Kibts.

With all that's been happening in Egypt, I'll be interested to see how the Copts fare in the coming months.


Rubbish piled into a collector's truck. Bags are stored in every available space.

Coptic church at the summit of garbage city



You never really leave a place like this. It stays in your mind and heart.

The Christian Arab, properly integrated into both wider Middle Eastern society and the Christian world, should be one of the great guarantors of lasting mutual comprehension and trust between two great religions - and more broadly between Islam and the West, as I have sometimes put it. Sadly, neither side seems often to realize that he exists, and when remembered he is increasingly abused, by fundamentalist Christians from abroad as well as fundamentalist Muslims at home. – HRH The Prince of Wales

We believe that what is good for the Copts is good for Egypt, and what is good for Egypt is good for the Copts. - Signatories of the First International Coptic Symposium Resolution

For more about the Copts, see the documentary at http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/garbage-dreams/film.html