Flu fear robs Cairo slum of its mainstay

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.

The squeal is gone.

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.

"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."

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. 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.

"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."