Cairo has one of the most effective recycling programs in the Middle East. But it’s borne on the backs of the city’s “garbage people,” Coptic Christians who harvest and sort 15,000 tons of waste every day. Their lives are documented in a new film Zabaleen…Cairo is nominally responsible for tending to waste. But corruption has resulted in an erosion of municipal services, and the Zabaleen take up the slack…
more, plus video, here.
(Source: thesmithian)
“The Frame: Jubilant crowds flood Cairo, escalating protests CAIRO (AP) — More than a quarter-million people flooded Cairo’s main square Tuesday in a stunning and jubilant array of young and old, urban poor and middle class professionals, mounting by far the largest protest yet in a week of unrelenting demands for President Hosni Mubarak to leave after nearly 30 years in power. The crowds - determined but peaceful - filled Tahrir, or Liberation, Square and spilled into nearby streets, among them people defying a government transportation shutdown to make their way from rural provinces. Protesters jammed in shoulder-to-shoulder, with schoolteachers, farmers, unemployed university graduates, women in conservative headscarves and women in high heels, men in suits and working-class men in scuffed shoes.”
The Frame: Rioting and chaos engulfs Egypt’s capital “CAIRO (AP) — Egypt’s military deployed on the streets of Cairo to enforce a nighttime curfew as the sun set Friday on a day of rioting and chaos that amounted to the biggest challenge ever to authoritarian President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year regime.”
@alexandria, looking out to mediterranean sea.
panorama with my mom while visiting egypt last summer.
