When you live in a city as large and overpopulated as Cairo, as I have this past semester, you see signs of poverty everywhere. Rarely, however, do you get a chance to glimpse the lives of those people who are the poverty statistics. But when you do, your way of thinking becomes radically altered.
A couple weeks ago my Wilson School policy task force went on a fieldtrip to an area called "Hey'at el-Zabbaleen" or the "Trash collectors' quarter," located on the Muqattam mountain in Cairo. More than half of Egyptians live below the poverty line. And more than 64,000 of them live in this quarter.
We drove in our professor's car; the area is so crowded and detached from the rest of the city that taxis refuse to take passengers there. The streets were like alleyways between towering, unfinished apartment buildings. Clusters of Egyptians with dirt-spattered clothing crowded the street, gawking at our cars as we passed by.
The stench was overwhelming. Run-down garbage trucks carried teetering mountains of trash that were deposited in the first floor of each apartment building, which was used for sorting the trash, amid roaming livestock and fly-infested compost piles.
Our professor had arranged a meeting with a mother and her three daughters, who lived in one unfinished room on the second floor with no electricity or running water. The third floor was reserved for three sons who had gone to work in the city and who would return and marry girls of the quarter.
As we sat with the women, the smell of rotten trash wafting up through their home, we learned about their life. Like many other neighborhood families, they had come from the Sa'id, or Upper Egypt, to escape the blood feuds which plagued the area and take up the job of sorting Cairo's trash. For each ton of trash they collected, the family made 180 Egyptian pounds, a little more than $35. Only one of the six children, a girl, was going to school. But she was about to drop out - the school was costing her mother 70 pounds a month - to stay home and help her mother.
I asked the girls if they wanted to get an education, go abroad and make a new life for themselves. But my question was received with looks of confusion: No, they said, why would they ever want to leave their home? They were lucky, their mother insisted, for having made it to the city. I asked if they had a TV or if they had seen other parts of the world and wanted to travel there. They did have a TV but didn't have the slightest desire to travel away from home. They were strangely satisfied; though the girls had never left Hey'at al-Zabbaleen, they didn't feel a need to.
Their only wish, they said, pointing to the redbrick walls splattered with cement, was to finish their apartment.
As the sun set, our guide recommended that we leave the quarter before it became too dark, so we thanked our hosts for their hospitality and climbed back into our cars, numbed by the experience.
Before studying abroad, I considered myself to be well aware of the blessings we have at Princeton. I joined in the chorus of criticism aimed at those who never left our "Orange Bubble," blissfully unaware of those struggling only a few miles away. Back then, "poverty" seemed to be a fairly fixable problem, and I admired the underprivileged who fight with all their might in the hopes of reaching a better life.
But as I sat in the car, thinking of the smiling girls and the threadbare curtains which hung across their room, I felt something other than admiration. I was sad. And I felt a sense of disorientation. How could such poverty exist? How could it be considered normal? How could the family even give the semblance of satisfaction?
And how could anyone ever formulate a policy to deal with it?
As Princetonians, we often approach the study of a region with barely-veiled arrogance about our own set of morals and standards of living. Political instability can be solved by free and fair elections. Economic development can best be achieved through free-market practices. Poverty comes from poor education. Everyone wants to travel, everyone wants to make money, everyone wants to change their circumstances and improve their lot.
But things are not so simple. When a culture instills humility and instinctive gratitude, and an overcrowded city creates a static, nearly paralyzing environment, living above a trash heap with your mom might be as good as things get. I don't know if I accept this, and I don't know if I'm meant to change this. But I do know that there is much yet to discover.
Happy journeys.
Sarah Dajani is a Wilson School major from Seminole, Fla., and is studying abroad in Cairo. She can be reached at sdajani@princeton.edu.
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