Where is that, do you say?
"Flu fear robs Cairo slum of its mainstay; Government culls swine raised by trash collectors" by Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times | June 7, 2009
The Shawki clan and many of their neighbors in a cliffside neighborhood of Cairo survive by collecting garbage. They also raised pigs until the government ordered 300,000 swine killed amid concerns - now dismissed - that the animals spread the epidemic. (Asmaa Waguih for The Los Angeles Times)
CAIRO - .... Trash trailing off him, he teeters around a corner and disappears into a parade of bent men. Sacks drop and flies gather in dark, humming whirls. Hands scrape plastic and rip cardboard, but a sound is missing....
Pigs are not to blame for the so-called swine flu, which in any case has not been found in this hilltop slum, but trucks flanked by armed police have come anyway and hauled away the pigs. Raised by Coptic Christian garbage collectors who fattened them with trash and sold them to non-Muslim butchers, the animals were among the 300,000 pigs the government ordered corralled and culled. Their silence means that what scant prosperity there was amid these cliffs has vanished.
Yeah, THANKS for the SWINE FLU SCARE so DRUG COMPANIES could MAKE $$$!!!! Another UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCE!!!
"How will I feed my children now? I've lost 70 percent of my income," says Ramzi Shawki, whose 120 pigs lived in a pen next to his house until they were driven away, slaughtered, and buried in trenches. "Our pigs are not sick. I can hold them in my arms. I'm 41 years old. I was born into collecting garbage and raising pigs. I've never been infected. But whoever doesn't give up their pigs gets arrested."
Here it is if you don't take the shot, to a detention camp with you.
Up this hill, where garbage from the city below is delivered in endless strands and clumps, poor men get poorer in the neighborhoods of the zabaleen. They are Cairo's trash collectors, tens of thousands of them, whose homes abut tiny dumps that have turned refuse into a way of life.
I can't even respond to that -- and it is also happening next door in Palestine as well as innumerable other places on the planet, including the US!!!
But the swine flu scare, global economic collapses, tumbling recycling prices - all the indiscernible errors of biology and stock markets - reach deep into a man's wallet here.
Everywhere. Yup, THANK YOU campaign of fear and panic!
"The government gave me 2,500 pounds for my animals," about $450, says Shawki, "but they were worth 18,000 pounds."
The men around him shake their heads. The same math has befallen each of them. They've been working all morning, since 4 a.m. Some are lucky enough to have contracts with the tourist hotels, but that garbage has become lighter, as if even rich people these days are eating everything on their plates and are not so quick to throw away things that could be fixed.
The men will go back out again later, keeping their women and children working until 10 p.m., but now it's time for tea, rolled bread, and eggs. "This is not a slum," says one. "It is good up here, not like people say."
Most of these men arrived in Cairo as boys decades ago from villages in southern Egypt. They dropped out of school and grabbed sacks, joining their fathers and uncles on new streets in new neighborhoods as the city expanded, messy and unbridled between the Nile and the desert. They feel safe up here, though sometimes boulders shear off the brittle cliffs and smash rooftops below.
Shawki and his uncle walk through an alley. Women kneel in piles of trash outside their homes, their hands smeared; their tunics, embroidered with beads, somehow stay clean. They seem not to notice the flies, spinning in funnels around them, as tides of trash wash in to be divvied, recycled, or burned. Shawki nods toward a brick wall and a girl runs through an opening to another brick wall, where she slips through a passage toward a sound that shouldn't be here.
"We're hiding three pigs back there," says Shawki, a hefty man with a long, broad nose and hands made for lifting. "I don't know what the young will do. My son ran away to look for other work, but he found nothing and came home. . . . I needed those pigs so I could marry my kids off."--more--"
And the result of the slaughter?
"After Egypt’s pigs killed, Cairo finds itself wading through piles of garbage" by Michael Slackman, New York Times | September 20, 2009
CAIRO - This litter-strewn metropolis is now wrestling with a garbage problem so severe it has managed to incite its weary residents and command the attention of the president....
Oooooooops!!!!
The crisis should not have come as a surprise. When the government killed all the pigs in Egypt this spring - in what public health specialists said was a misguided attempt to combat swine flu - it was warned the city would be overwhelmed with trash.
I didn't really read that three months ago in the article above.
The pigs used to eat tons of organic waste. Now the pigs are gone and the rotting food piles up on the streets of middle-class neighborhoods like Heliopolis and in the poor streets of communities like Imbaba....
What started out as an impulsive response to the swine flu threat has turned into a social, environmental, and political problem for the Arab world’s most populous state. It has exposed the failings of a government where the power is concentrated at the top, where decisions are often carried out with little consideration for their consequences and where follow-up is often nonexistent, according to social commentators and government officials....
Are they talking about AmeriKa or Egypt?
Speaking broadly, there are two systems for receiving services in Egypt. The government system and the do-it-yourself system. Instead of following the channels of bureaucracy, most people rely on an informal system of personal contacts and bribes to get a building permit, pass an inspection, get a driver’s license - or make a living.
And they are different from AmeriKa how?
“The straight and narrow path is just too bureaucratic and burdensome for the rich person, and for the poor, the formal system does not provide him with survival, it does not give him safety security or meet his needs,’’ said Laila Iskandar Kamel, chairwoman of a community development organization in Cairo.
Hello, Egyptian brothers and sisters.
Cairo’s garbage collection belonged to the informal sector.
Sounds "good," right?
The government hired multinational companies to collect the trash, and the companies decided to place bins around the city. But they failed to understand the ethos of the community. People do not take their garbage out. They are accustomed to someone collecting it from the door.
Oh, like IN AMERICA!!!
For more than half a century, those collectors were the zabaleen, a community of Egyptian Christians who live on the cliffs on the eastern edge of the city. They collected the trash, sold the recyclables, and fed the organic waste to their pigs - which they then slaughtered and ate.
And the GOVERNMENT-HIRED MULTINATIONALS sort off f***ed things up before the swine slaughter, 'eh?
When the swine flu fear first emerged, long before even one case was reported in Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak ordered that all the pigs be killed in order to prevent the spread of the disease. When health officials worldwide said that the virus was not being passed by pigs, the Egyptian government said the cull was no longer about flu, but about cleaning up the zabaleen’s crowded, filthy, neighborhood.
So they just wanted to destroy a "way of life?"
--more--"
