People power cleans up Cairo's streets

As city officials bickered and the rubbish heaps mounted on Dana Moussa's street, she rallied a group of about 100 of her Facebook friends to help clean up the neighbourhood.

A woman gestures as she talks about the strike by rubbish men in the low-income neighbourhood of Imbaba in Cairo.

CAIRO // The streets of Egypt's capital have never been particularly clean, said Dana Moussa. But since rubbish men in Giza, a suburb of Cairo, went on strike three weeks ago, the rubbish that was once just part of the scenery quickly turned into towering monuments of civic neglect. "I knew that the garbage men weren't coming because they were on strike, but the store owners could go down and clean around their stores," said Ms Moussa, a Giza resident who works for a non-profit development organisation. "Every time I asked them, the answer would be: 'Oh it's not my responsibility. It's the garbage men's responsibility.'

"The typical Egyptian answer is that my job on Earth is not to pick up trash. That's someone else's job." So Ms Moussa decided to make it her job. As city officials bickered among each other and maggots and dead cats joined the rubbish accumulating on her street, she rallied a group of about 100 of her Facebook friends and friends-of-friends to clean up the Giza neighbourhood of Mohandiseen last Saturday.

Ms Moussa's small effort - it would take thousands of workers to clean the soiled streets of Giza, she said - made headlines in Egyptian newspapers as a demonstration of how ordinary individuals can help fill a vacuum of responsibility left by those in charge. But for Ms Moussa, 23, the one-day clean-up also illuminated why so few Egyptians are able to organise a grassroots community action. "It makes a difference when you've lived somewhere else outside Egypt and you see the way that the average citizen is responsible," said Ms Moussa, who graduated from Northeastern University in Boston last year.

"There's an active civil society where people feel it's their responsibility to clean around them, for their health, for their families' well-being, for their neighbours." Cairo's complicated relationship with its own waste has long been one of the city's curiosities. For generations, a community known here as the Zabaleen, or rubbish men, made their living by collecting the city's rubbish, feeding organic refuse to pigs and recycling almost everything else.

In 2002, the Giza governorate contracted with International Environment Services (IES), an Italian-Egyptian joint venture company, to manage the city's waste. Giza began to charge residents a monthly tax - something that had not been seen before under the Zabaleen - for waste management services. But the state's answer to Cairo's dirty problem has not always sat well with Gizans. "They're taking the tax but not picking up the garbage, so we have to throw it on the street," said Fatima Abdel Aziz, who lives in Imbaba, one of the poorest areas of Giza.

"Before they used to let us pay the workers at the door, now the company taxes the electricity bill. Ever since then, they don't pick up the garbage because [the workers] don't feel like they're getting paid." The problems for Ms Aziz and her neighbours worsened when the H1N1 virus, the so-called swine flu, became a global concern in April. The Egyptian government responded to the nascent epidemic by slaughtering all of the country's 300,000 swine. Without pigs to eat their trash, the Zabaleen stopped collecting organic waste, which Cairenes left to rot in the street.

Then last month, the governorate's long-fraught relationship with IES soured. Giza officials threatened to withhold payment, accusing IES of offering inconsistent and inadequate service. "The company failed because their cars are weak and they are always out of order. They have few labourers who earn low salaries," said Mustafa al Khatib, the head of the People's Assembly in Giza governorate, who said the company paid its workers only 300 pounds (Dh200) per month, barely enough to ensure that the job gets done.

So IES employees went on strike, a move that IES said it had nothing to do with. Company officials said they abided by the terms of their nearly contract of three million pounds per month. "IES didn't call a strike or incite the workers to do this," said a company spokesperson by e-mail. "On the contrary, all the manpower was working, but the problem was the shortage of the company's vehicles because of a lack of maintenance."

The Giza governorate paid IES two million pounds on Saturday to help the company refurbish its vehicles. Both the governorate and IES have said that the conflict is now over. Three weeks after the strike began, the sight of Ms Moussa and her well-educated, middle-class friends bending over to collect rubbish from the street drew stares and jeers, but also plaudits and praise. In Egypt's class-conscience society, trash collection is normally considered the province of the poor. Even the act of throwing away refuse in the correct bin or picking up litter from the street is seen by many Egyptians as an unsavoury task better left to someone else, Ms Moussa explained.

Despite those attitudes, Ms Moussa was surprised by the response she received on her Facebook group "Clean Up Giza", which now boasts nearly 400 members. "I expected just the people I was friends with or people I know to show up," she said. "Somehow, it randomly got passed on to different people who invited their friends, who invited more of theirs. And I started receiving e-mails from people around the country - young people and old people."

Getting feet on the ground was the easy part. As word spread, bureaucratic barriers and the entrenched suspicion of security authorities became Ms Moussa's primary concern. First, Ms Moussa contacted the Amn el-Dowla, Egypt's state security, to inform them that she expected more than 30 or 40 participants. Security officials told her that she could not be a member of an organisation that was not registered with the ministry of social solidarity. She assured the officials that there would be no political uniforms or placards. This was not a protest, she said.

"Going through this taught me that this is a big reason why a lot of people don't do these kinds of movements," said Ms Moussa, who added that if she had not had experience working for an non-governmental organisation, she would not have known where to start. "It takes a lot of bureaucratic background work." When an organisation linked to the Zabaleen volunteered to transport the collected trash to recycling facilities outside the city, Ms Moussa was told she needed personal permission from the governor. It is apparently illegal to move trash from one Egyptian governorate to another.

So Ms Moussa spent nearly a week calling and visiting the governor's office in an attempt to reach him. Finally, she sent him a telegraph, which is still the preferred medium for formal communication with high-level Egyptian officials. Finally, late last Thursday, two days before her scheduled pickup, the Giza governor called Ms Moussa and offered city lorries to move the trash and city buses to transport volunteers.

But when Ms Moussa's small army of young volunteers arrived at the four locations they had designated for cleaning - with local media in tow - they were surprised to discover that city rubbish lorries had beat them to the punch. Rubbish lorries or not, there was still enough trash on the street to keep the volunteers busy last Saturday. And while the episode may have smacked of political showmanship, Ms Moussa said seeing some action, however small, from the local officials was enough to make the whole ordeal feel like a job well done.

"Honestly, I was happy about that," she said. "To be able to [encourage] someone to do that was more than enough for us."
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