Garbage City, Cairo. Where the surplus of some becomes the survival of others.
"As long as there is poverty in the world I can never be rich, even if I have a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people in this world cannot expect to live more than twenty-eight or thirty years, I can never be totally healthy, even if I just got a good checkup at the Mayo Clinic. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the way our world is made. No individual or nation can stand out boasting of being independent. We are all interdependent."
- Martin Luther King-
Have you ever wondered where all your trash goes? Are you aware that the trash we think we “throw away” does not magically disappear, but goes somewhere? That “somewhere” has a name here in Cairo. It is called Garbage City. As weird as it may sound, it is a city of garbage where people like you and I live a normal life. My trash, your trash, everyone’s trash - everyone’s surplus, excess, and disposable items – is a means of survival for the people of Garbage City. It is good and bad, brilliant and unacceptable - a city of contradiction.
How did we come to reside in a world where living off trash is a good idea? There is an unfair distribution of resources where some live in the surplus while others live off that surplus. Some have too much, some have too little. Gandhi once said, “The world has enough for everyone needs, but not for everyone’s greed.” How do we make sure that everyone has enough? How do we develop and economic system where everyone will take what they need without taking more? How can a system promote people to act upon pure goodness and love towards the rest of the world? How can we develop a system that promotes self-control, kindness, patience, love, peace?
There is not a system that will solve the issue of greed. It is a choice of the human heart to live for a higher purpose than oneself: the others. In the words of Martin Luther King “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment. Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: what are you doing for others?”
Humanity is interdependent. Every small act, as insignificant that it might be, has a significant impact in the world and its future, like the butterfly effect. We are all not called to be human rights activists, world poverty relief organization members or even to give thousands of dollars for charity. It is much simpler than that: we are to answer the call of being responsible for the greatest good for the greatest community known as the world. That is the heart of community; interdependent life based on the integrity of the members which organically organize themselves to serve the altruistic goal. As good as it might sound, how far are we to become such community?
My experience in garbage city gave me a clear understanding 
that no great efforts to fight poverty can be efficient if it does not start with the small efforts of living a life of solidarity towards the local and global community. Maybe some people don’t care about garbage city in Cairo, but there are numerous places in the world where people live off the garbage and even in your own city or neighborhood homeless people dig in the trash to survive (wherever their circumstances where that took them to that lifestyle). I wish not for people to consider helping this people by throwing better trash, but to actually live a life of “WE” rather than “ME”.
that no great efforts to fight poverty can be efficient if it does not start with the small efforts of living a life of solidarity towards the local and global community. Maybe some people don’t care about garbage city in Cairo, but there are numerous places in the world where people live off the garbage and even in your own city or neighborhood homeless people dig in the trash to survive (wherever their circumstances where that took them to that lifestyle). I wish not for people to consider helping this people by throwing better trash, but to actually live a life of “WE” rather than “ME”.Ironically there is something that I found to be a surplus in Garbage City. Their surplus has helped me to survive in my materialistic consumerist lifestyle: simplicity and humility. Maybe my trash is important for them, but their simplicity is important to me. If poverty is define as “the lack of” then, I am “poor” because of the lack of simplicity in my life and they are the“rich” and at the same time materially “poor”. Maybe in the end we aren’t that different; we are both “rich”, and both “poor” in need to learn from one another and to start helping each other in seeking what is really essential to life.
From Garbage city, where your trash is important to us.
Simply Me.