Recycle City

What makes a person worthy of not being alone, of being seen and having value. Why is it we can see people as unworthy of having a place to call home, of taking up space. When you have a group of people who don’t belong are they ostracized just because you say they don’t belong? What if they belong to each other and you just can’t see it for what it is.

I am continually perplexed by American homelessness, I have yet to witness vast amounts of people who “don’t belong” in any of the countries I have visited. Don’t get me wrong I see very very poor people. People who don’t have running water or sewage lines leaving sturdy homes. But, I never see people who don’t belong. Even the poorest people are allowed to set up camps, build shanty towns with each other. They are allowed to work for meager sums, men often doing dangerous dirty work, women working as servants, cleaners, cooks, or low skilled artisans decorating the mass produced products for souvenir stands. They may not be praised or overly welcomed into society, they are often still looked on as untouchable, but the they are allowed to exist, to gather amongst them selves, to create community and full fill purpose inside a bigger picture. Why do we not allow this in America? Why do we deem people who have nothing unworthy of everything. Are we that shallow that material possessions has replaced what it means to be human. We do not let thw homeless build shanty towns, we do not let them work for meager sums, we do let them engage. We hardly even look at them. We lock our car doors, roll up our windows, walk faster as we pass by. As if speed and aversion the only way to not infect us with their disease. In America we look for for big shiny solutions, and new innovations to rid of us the problem of homelessness. We refuse to see the light before us in human soles, who posses ingenuity and faculty of their own. We want an outside solution beamed in with grandeur, that involves lots of capital and innovation. And this is where we are, unwilling to budge on the idea that perhaps this mass of people could save them selves if they were allowed to exist amongst us rather than waiting for legislation or technology solve it for us.

Howard Hasbrouck writes that “people of the North believe that machines are more reliable than people, and with them we can live in splendid isolation, where as people of the south can’t rely on machines there for have learned to rely on each other. Security and independence relies on human relationships. Interdependence is a fact of life in the south.Northern countries we are rich in material possession, are wealth makes labor expensive, efficiency is measured by maximizing what can be done with as little human labor. Southern countries have a surplus of labor and little capital they look at efficiency as what can be done with fixed amount of material and a surplus of labor, if they can reduce materials it is a money saving ideas.”

Perhaps our need to see people as less is quite embedded in our culture, and we have much to learn from looking south.

While in cairo we went to "garbage city" more appropriately rebranded Recycle City. In 1910 a group of coptic christians had to leave there home in southern Egypt due to drought. They arrived in Cairo as farmers with no land to tend. They began collecting trash to feed their animals. This service grew and now a community of 100,000 people live in a coptic christian suburb of cairo. They collect, sort and recycle thousands of pounds of trash each day. Every day 5-7000 men and boys go around the city in Tuk tusk and donkey carts and collect waste to bring back. Women and girls job is to separate the trash. They open bags of trash and sort piles of cans, plastic, and organic material by hand. They are able to recycle 85% of the trash that they collect. Aluminum gets smelted down into bricks to be sold. Plastic bottles and bags get washed crushed and bundled, then melted into plastic pellets to be sold by the bag. Organic material is fed to pigs or turned into compost. All of this is done in the streets amongst the homes and stores that make up the comunity.

These people are bravely facing a the problem of human waste head on rather than burying it for another day. And there is money to be had. Enough money that the government noticed and has now began collecting fees for the cities trash. And so this community endures, having carved out a space for themselves. Using the labor of many, they provide a service that few would take on, and the world desperately needs. With the money they have accumulated as a community they have built schools for their children, churches and a community thriving within.

Would we allow this in America? Probably not. Would we shut it down for sanitary and safety concerns? Definitely. But then what? What would we tell this whole community of people who had nothing but ingenuity and desire to provide a life for themselves? That they had no right to exist? They are actually doing the whole globe a favor by showing us how simple a recycling chain can be. They are doing what my home city says is impossible. We burry our sorted recycling, or ship it to other places to deal with it. These folks live the reality of what it means for us to have a disposable life style. They have built a life on it. They are happy and proud. You can see it in their smiles