Cairo’s ‘garbage people’ look to God
In First Things, Matthew Schmitz described Cairo’s “garbage people”: Christians who collect the city’s litter and are on the economic, social and religious margins of the city. “More than the trash they collect, the God they kneel to makes them objects of contempt,” he wrote.
But Garbage City, the region where the 50,000 litter-pickers (almost all Christians) live, is alive with faith. “As if to compensate for the de facto prohibition of Christian images elsewhere in Cairo, every building in Garbage City seems to bear some proclamation of Christian faith. Walls are adorned with a verse of Scripture, or a pale Italianate Madonna dissolving into clouds, or a Christ drawing men toward his Sacred Heart.”
