Cairo is a thriving city with a rich history and amazing sights. The longer I was there, the more I grew accustomed to the noise and air pollution and the more I appreciated the interesting layers of the city that I was just starting to peel away. By the title you may be thinking I mean Cairo is full of litter and trash. And to a westerner’s eye it very well may be. But I am talking about a certain neighborhood in Cairo referred to as Garbage City. And that is just what it is. All of the trash collected from Cairo’s twenty some-odd million people eventually winds up here in the Mokattam neighborhood to be sorted, recycled, and lived amongst. Garbage is piled two stories high, kids play on and in heaps of trash and, like an alpine city is coated in a light blanket of snow, Garbage City is covered with other peoples’ trash.

The Zabbaleen are a Coptic (Egyptian) Christian group that came to Egypt about fifty years ago from Southern Egypt and settled on the outskirts of the city. Gradually they began to collect garbage in carts and through their own initiative they started sorting the waste and trading it, eventually manufacturing the garbage in the 1980s with development agency assistance. Over the years, they’ve used their profits from trash to upgrade their neighborhoods, educate their children (nearly all are currently enrolled in school), create jobs for their women, and improve their equipment and methods.

More so than the rest of Cairo, this Garbage City is full of garbage-in the streets, in big canvas sacks, spilling onto the streets, with the smell of garbage that you can imagine. But it is not as bad as it sounds. The gargantuan piles have actually been sorted into recycling groups of plastic, glass, and other materials to be reused. The residents of Mokattam count their blessings – unlike others, they have a steady source of income. The Zabbaleen go around and collect trash from the bustling metropolis by morning and sort through it in the evening to see if they can find anything salvageable. Specifically, they try to find recyclables, for which they earn a few more pounds for.  It seems strange to some, but our tour guide tells us that these people are better off than some other poor members of society. In fact, greater Cairo’s approximately 60,000 Zabbaleen, who gather one third of the city’s 10,000 tons of daily garbage, have what is considered one of the world’s most innovative and efficient models of solid waste disposal. They collect the garbage, sort it, and then recycle as much as 80 percent of it into raw materials and manufactured goods – plastics, rugs, pots, paper, and glass – which are then traded with thousands of businesses nationwide. Driving through the bustling neighborhood, we were greeted with the smiles and waves of happy children. In fact one ten-year old girl with chocolate eyes and a wishful smile literally ran with our bus through the cluttered streets most of the time we were there. Just when we thought we’d lost her, she’d catch up to us and be waving at our side. It was almost like a spirit of life was looking into our eyes and it was quite moving.

There were more than one thousand deaths as a result of Islamic insurgency in Upper Egypt during the early to mid 1990s. Most were militants or policeman, but sometimes a few tourists got caught up in this mess. Egypt’s extreme Islamic groups’ anger is more of a response to the current bad economic times the citizens face here on a daily basis. Failed government promises and policies have not kept up with the exploding population and many of the citizens live in overcrowded, crumbling buildings in filth and squalor.

Some groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood (from which grew the 1987-formed Islamic resistance movement Hamas – one of the most violent Palestinian militant groups) were denied recognition by the state as a legal political group and they eventually turned to violence to get attention. A culmination of bitterness unfortunately resulted in brutal attacks against tourist through the 1990s including a fire bomb attack outside the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (where I recently saw amazing artifacts from King Tutankhamen’s tomb and other ancient Egyptian marvels) and a massacre of several tourists in Luxor’s Valley of the Kings. Here six assailants, armed with automatic weapons and knives, killed 62 people (mom: stop reading now) by beheading and disembowelment. The attackers then hijacked a bus, but the Egyptian tourist police and military forces engaged in a gun battle with the terrorists, who were later killed or committed suicide.

In 2004, 31 people were killed in a bombing at the Hilton hotel in tourist hotspot, Taba (near the Israeli border), on the beach in the Sinai Peninsula.

The deadliest attack in Egypt’s recent history was just about four years ago when eighty-eight people were killed and over 150 were wounded by bomb blasts. Also on the Sinai Peninsula, the attacks occurred in Egypt’s most popular resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh. The attacks took place in the early morning hours, at a time when many tourists and locals were still out at restaurants, cafés and bars. The majority of dead and wounded casualties were Egyptians. Among the others killed were 11 Brits, six Italians, two Germans, one Czech, one Israeli, and one American. There were conflicting claims of responsibility. Several hours after the attacks, a group citing ties to Al Qaeda issued a claim on an Islamic Web site.

Things have been relatively quiet since, now that Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, has caved a bit to international pressure by leaning more toward a Western style democracy and introducing direct and competitive presidential elections so tourism continues at a steady clip. But some major security measures are still in place. Police convoys were introduced by the Egyptian government after these attacks as a way to give tourists a (false) sense of security. I rode in one of these ridiculous convoys from Aswan south to the temples of Abu Simbel, just a mere 40 kilometers from the Sudanese border ( I so wanted to make a run for the border). We had to get up around 3am and join the convoy at 4am (why so early? We have no idea, but some say so the police can finish the day early). The convoy is one long line of taxis and tourist buses driving dangerously fast on poor roads to keep up with the speed demon police vehicle in front. The convoy moves at the same time every day all week long. To me, not only was it an accident waiting to happen as bus drivers sped along the desert landscape just to keep up, it couldn’t have been a more obvious moving target of loads of tourists in one place if anyone wanted to mess with us. So, in other words, if any terrorist group wanted to attack tourists…now it knows exactly when and where they are – seems to defeat the purpose, no?

The streets and crumbling sidewalks are strewn with litter. The unimaginative concrete buildings are coated with blackish stains from years of pollution. The air is thick with dust and car exhaust fumes. The sounds of horns and bus engines fill the air. I walked alone down the cracked and potholed sidewalks of downtown Cairo forcing myself to go against my natural instinct to make eye contact with people nearly taking all of my energy to intentionally look through the crowds passing me instead of at them. Being a blue-eyed, blond-haired (at the moment) woman walking solo, unintentionally I attracted a multitude of stares, hisses, and comments. I passed dozens of shops selling cheap-looking, yet trendy clothes and boots. Couples walked together. Colorfully head-scarved women walked arm in arm. Men walked together. It was the rare sight to see a woman alone. Some looked quite western and wore no scarf at all while a very, very few passed me wearing the full chador – the complete black gown mysteriously and exotically covering all but the eyes.

When I arrived at Cairo International airport on my midnight flight from Milan, it was four o’clock in the morning. For the first time since I can remember on my trip, I arranged a pick-up transfer (taxi ride) from the airport. In most cities around the world from Asia to Europe, I’ve been able to hop on some kind of public transport – metro or bus to downtown. But here, I had decided to give myself a break knowing I’d be tired and not wanting be deal with aggressive salesmen (cab drivers). But when I walked through the crowd of drivers holding up their placards, clipboards, and makeshift paper signs with passengers’ names…none said “Lisa Lubin.” Great. I decided to just hang around a bit before I went through immigration. Perhaps my guy was just late. I waited a half an hour. A few other drivers even tried to help me, but they just said to wait. I was tired and not in the mood to be ripped off nor was I in the mood to haggle – hence my foresight to pre-book a taxi…which, to my dismay was no where to be found. In the meantime, I bought my Tourist Visa from a man at a window who did not even want to see my passport, just my $15. I withdrew hundreds of Egyptian Pounds from an ATM and finally made my way through immigration. Soon after, my trusty bag came around on the baggage carousel and I decided to wait just a bit more before starting the dreaded haggling process with a cabbie who would no doubt make some extra cash off this weary American traveler.

I stared down every guy walking around holding a placard. One man was talking on his cell phone and slowly approaching me. We continued to make eye contact and I knew…this was my man. He was 40 minutes late and did not acknowledge this fact at all, but I was just thankful that he was there. He traded me off to another man, the actual driver, a thin Egyptian man with a tired leathery face who spoke with a very raspy smoker’s voice and appeared to be much older than he probably was. During our white-knuckle drive downtown, he told me he had eight children and one wife, but a second wife ‘from Chicago’, he joked, was not out of the question. He sped me to my hotel, most of the way swerving and straddling two lanes on the road.

At 7am, I was able to check into my room, inspected the threadbare sheets (where’s the plush Egyptian cotton?) in which I unhappily discovered more hairs than I was comfortable with (I am usually comfortable with zero hairs of a stranger in my bed), but in my exhaustion, just pulled out my sleep sack and dozed off only to call reception several hours later to actually get them to change the sheets and towels from my room which was obviously not cleaned since the last guest left – different country, different standards. But I am pleased with my new found flexibility for not-so-clean conditions and took it all in exhausted stride. I remember as a kid barely wanting to sit on the edge of a hotel bed in fear of getting the ‘cooties.’ And now here I was snuggling into someone else’s bed of dark curly body hair. Mmmm. I know you just cringed…okay, me too…I’m still no Irish Jesus Backpacker…but I’m working on it.