"Prof. H, what is a garbage village?"
The night before I left, I received a surprise phone call from one of my students who had just graduated. A delightful young Muslim man from a huge city in South Asia, he was privileged to have an excellent private secondary education (and a mother who is an English teacher to make sure his skills were the best) and an undergraduate college education here. He was eager to share the good news about his new job in a Houston bank and to hear about my trip. When I told him I would be living at a Coptic monastery just above a garbage village in Cairo, he asked, polite but puzzled, “Professor Hampton, what is a garbage village?” His ignorance about this phenomenon surprised me because surely every megalopolis in the Third World has squatter settlements, if not actually garbage villages. Had he been as sheltered from poverty as I?
It did not take me much time in Mokattam to realize that my explanation to M, based on our readings and interaction with former Trekkers, was not adequate. Even now, I do not think words can do it justice. We arrived in the middle of the night, the van turning off the highway to make its way up the steep rocky road and through narrow streets, still filled with people, trucks, donkeys, goats, and piles of garbage, some sorted and ready for recycling. It was eerie, with a sort of yellow glow from the headlights softening the shock. We continued winding up the precipice. Mokattam means broken rock; the Egypt of my imagination was flat and sandy, but its reality is very different. Finally, we reached the gates of St. Simon, a Coptic Monastery. Passing through them, we could still smell the acrid garbage odor, but suddenly there were small trees growing seemingly right out of the rock along the edge of the road, and looking up we could see biblical scenes carved into the rock soaring above us, surreal and beautiful. What kind of oasis was this, juxtaposed against the hellish place we had just passed through? We would find out in the morning. We fell into our cramped beds (the five of us women in three beds in a room gritty with the Mokattam debris that saturates the air), batted the flies away, and were thankful for the ceiling fan that the Trek leader, who had given up her room to us, said had just been installed. As we tried to get comfortable and go to sleep, the first call to prayer floated across the air, lasting for perhaps half an hour. Mokattam and St. Simon are never silent. We would discover that this noise pollution deepens the assault of the fetid air and searing heat and constant motion and pressing crowds.
In the morning, we opened a screen door to a tiny balcony. Standing out there and looking to our right we could see the monastery complex, its cathedral entrance, its Egyptian style food court, its parking lot for the buses that bring Coptic tourists/pilgrims for camps and services, its cafeteria and bookstore, and of course, its biblical carvings such a contrast to the rough rock walls. Looking straight ahead we could see Mokattam itself, a “village” of 30,000 people, crammed into tenements three or four stories tall with lower floors open to the streets where the garbage is stored and where (we would discover as we walked through it) the women sorted the refuse and the youngest children played. Looking to our left, off in the hazy distance and dominating the skyline, we could see the dome and spires of the Citadel, a Muslim mosque and fortress, where in two days’ time we would watch the whirling dervishes. Mokattam itself houses very few Muslims (are there any?); it is a Coptic Christian community like the monastery rising above it.
After meeting the Trek team of students at breakfast, we went with some of them to a boys’ school, where they worked each day. Trekkers are students who are working with the poorest of the urban poor here in Cairo (where there are two teams, one at Mokattam and one in the city working with Sudanese refugees) and this year also in Manila, Bangkok and Mexico City. Not only are they trying to alleviate some of the appalling conditions, but they are grappling with the factors that create these conditions (applying their academic skills) and they are discerning whether God has called them to such service long term. It did not take us long to realize that we were with the very finest of American students. Their hearts had been broken by the people whose conditions are unbearable, and in their pain they forged ahead to share Mokattam’s suffering as redemptively as they could.
Dotted throughout Mokattam are schools, a hospital, the Association for the Protection of the Environment (a micro-enterprise that teaches young women how to weave the recycled cloth into rugs and other merchadise) and a (Mother Teresa) Sisters of Charity home for children and old women. On our first morning we toured these places of service, picking our way over the refuse of the refuse that coated the streets, and squeezing among the hordes of dirty but cheerful children (“Hallo, hallo,” they cried out, grabbing our free hands), the careening and blaring trucks and cars, the bread vendors raising their trays of bread high above their heads, the old men having tea and a backgammon game at the edge of the street, braying donkeys and goats, scurrying rats, and the rickety carts piled high with garbage. I was struck at how, at the entrance to each, the filth was held back and comparative serenity enveloped us. In the courtyard of the Sisters of Charity a rose garden bloomed and showered its beauty over the unfortunates who had become the fortunates. The contrast to the throbbing and pulsing chaos outside was overwhelming.
As we debriefed together after our second day in a cave church at St. Simon, where pilgrims chanted ancient prayers before the icons as we talked, we tried to make sense of all we had seen and heard and smelled. Two simultaneous impressions stirred up emotional and intellectual (and even spiritual) tensions in us. The first was how these people (especially the women) seemed so much happier than the people we had observed in Turkey. This struck L. especially hard. She wondered if it were because they are Christians. The second was that they should not be happy or contented to sit in garbage and have little hope that their children might escape their fate. Why didn’t they rebel or rage? Through her tears, J. herself raged. Shouldn’t they want something better? Shouldn’t we want better for them? Or are we just arrogant as to think we know better than they how they ought to live? After all, a respected Egyptian religious leader had just reminded us that America’s designs for democracy in the Middle East is not always welcomed. Are the economic plans of outsiders any more appropriate? S, who had brought his whole family here for five weeks in 2002, shared a dream he had had which had arisen out of this very dissonance. He saw his own children covered in dung like some of the people of Mokattam and knew that as he would not allow his own children to remain in that state, so too we ought not allow the residents to remain in that state even if they could not imagine life differently.
K. had begun asking questions about the relationship between the monastery community and the garbage village. A gate with guards separates them. “Why are you guarding the monastery?” he asked. The answer came back quickly: “We are keeping the Muslims out.” Any Muslim would have to travel through the village to get to the monastery and one wonders why they would want to do so. Nevertheless, the answer was shocking. The long history of deep animosity between the Copts (the original Christians in Egypt whose history dates back to Mark, Jesus’ disciple) and the majority Muslims probably explains it (though it does not from our outsider perspective justify it). The Copts are a despised minority in the country. Even more disturbing was the phenomenon that so disgusted the Trekkers. The busloads of tourist/pilgrims pass right on by their fellow Copts’ distress in order to get to the monastery. Do they not see their plight? As one of the Trekkers wrote in his electronic journal, Westerners are not the only ones who lack the empathy for the poor. (My student’s ignorance about global urban poverty is another indication of how insulated we who are wealthy are from the pain of others, but how can I fault him in my own business-as-usual, day-to-day materialism?)
My article on reading Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses after 9/1l has just been published in Pro Rege. The primary conclusion I drew from this novel, so offensive to Muslims, is that it ought to drive its Christian readers back to scripture to discover there how we are to interact with them, especially those who are the immigrants of this world. (Rushdie claims that the novel is not a caricature of Islam but an exploration of the immigrant condition—he is less than candid about the first claim but so right about the second.) It propelled me to Hebrews. There in Hebrews 13:11-13 we see that we are to go with the suffering Jesus “outside the city gate bearing the disgrace he bore.” Mokattam is “outside the gate” where, as in Jesus’ day, the odor of burning refuse permeates everything. It is literally outside of St. Simon, outside of Cairo, and outside of the lives of the rich, whether they are Christian or not. Being in the garbage village for four days showed me how easy it is to write such words but how very difficult it is to live them. A few students, American and Egyptian, and some other volunteers are sharing in the sufferings of the people of Mokattam. How can I join them—if not literally myself? Or is such sharing only literal, physical? How can I not pass by on my way to religious services? How can I invite others, particulary Muslims, into the oasis of faith? How can we all rejoice as we make sure that Mokattam is not “an enduring city”? How shall we live as we are “looking for the city that is to come”?
It did not take me much time in Mokattam to realize that my explanation to M, based on our readings and interaction with former Trekkers, was not adequate. Even now, I do not think words can do it justice. We arrived in the middle of the night, the van turning off the highway to make its way up the steep rocky road and through narrow streets, still filled with people, trucks, donkeys, goats, and piles of garbage, some sorted and ready for recycling. It was eerie, with a sort of yellow glow from the headlights softening the shock. We continued winding up the precipice. Mokattam means broken rock; the Egypt of my imagination was flat and sandy, but its reality is very different. Finally, we reached the gates of St. Simon, a Coptic Monastery. Passing through them, we could still smell the acrid garbage odor, but suddenly there were small trees growing seemingly right out of the rock along the edge of the road, and looking up we could see biblical scenes carved into the rock soaring above us, surreal and beautiful. What kind of oasis was this, juxtaposed against the hellish place we had just passed through? We would find out in the morning. We fell into our cramped beds (the five of us women in three beds in a room gritty with the Mokattam debris that saturates the air), batted the flies away, and were thankful for the ceiling fan that the Trek leader, who had given up her room to us, said had just been installed. As we tried to get comfortable and go to sleep, the first call to prayer floated across the air, lasting for perhaps half an hour. Mokattam and St. Simon are never silent. We would discover that this noise pollution deepens the assault of the fetid air and searing heat and constant motion and pressing crowds.
In the morning, we opened a screen door to a tiny balcony. Standing out there and looking to our right we could see the monastery complex, its cathedral entrance, its Egyptian style food court, its parking lot for the buses that bring Coptic tourists/pilgrims for camps and services, its cafeteria and bookstore, and of course, its biblical carvings such a contrast to the rough rock walls. Looking straight ahead we could see Mokattam itself, a “village” of 30,000 people, crammed into tenements three or four stories tall with lower floors open to the streets where the garbage is stored and where (we would discover as we walked through it) the women sorted the refuse and the youngest children played. Looking to our left, off in the hazy distance and dominating the skyline, we could see the dome and spires of the Citadel, a Muslim mosque and fortress, where in two days’ time we would watch the whirling dervishes. Mokattam itself houses very few Muslims (are there any?); it is a Coptic Christian community like the monastery rising above it.
After meeting the Trek team of students at breakfast, we went with some of them to a boys’ school, where they worked each day. Trekkers are students who are working with the poorest of the urban poor here in Cairo (where there are two teams, one at Mokattam and one in the city working with Sudanese refugees) and this year also in Manila, Bangkok and Mexico City. Not only are they trying to alleviate some of the appalling conditions, but they are grappling with the factors that create these conditions (applying their academic skills) and they are discerning whether God has called them to such service long term. It did not take us long to realize that we were with the very finest of American students. Their hearts had been broken by the people whose conditions are unbearable, and in their pain they forged ahead to share Mokattam’s suffering as redemptively as they could.
Dotted throughout Mokattam are schools, a hospital, the Association for the Protection of the Environment (a micro-enterprise that teaches young women how to weave the recycled cloth into rugs and other merchadise) and a (Mother Teresa) Sisters of Charity home for children and old women. On our first morning we toured these places of service, picking our way over the refuse of the refuse that coated the streets, and squeezing among the hordes of dirty but cheerful children (“Hallo, hallo,” they cried out, grabbing our free hands), the careening and blaring trucks and cars, the bread vendors raising their trays of bread high above their heads, the old men having tea and a backgammon game at the edge of the street, braying donkeys and goats, scurrying rats, and the rickety carts piled high with garbage. I was struck at how, at the entrance to each, the filth was held back and comparative serenity enveloped us. In the courtyard of the Sisters of Charity a rose garden bloomed and showered its beauty over the unfortunates who had become the fortunates. The contrast to the throbbing and pulsing chaos outside was overwhelming.
As we debriefed together after our second day in a cave church at St. Simon, where pilgrims chanted ancient prayers before the icons as we talked, we tried to make sense of all we had seen and heard and smelled. Two simultaneous impressions stirred up emotional and intellectual (and even spiritual) tensions in us. The first was how these people (especially the women) seemed so much happier than the people we had observed in Turkey. This struck L. especially hard. She wondered if it were because they are Christians. The second was that they should not be happy or contented to sit in garbage and have little hope that their children might escape their fate. Why didn’t they rebel or rage? Through her tears, J. herself raged. Shouldn’t they want something better? Shouldn’t we want better for them? Or are we just arrogant as to think we know better than they how they ought to live? After all, a respected Egyptian religious leader had just reminded us that America’s designs for democracy in the Middle East is not always welcomed. Are the economic plans of outsiders any more appropriate? S, who had brought his whole family here for five weeks in 2002, shared a dream he had had which had arisen out of this very dissonance. He saw his own children covered in dung like some of the people of Mokattam and knew that as he would not allow his own children to remain in that state, so too we ought not allow the residents to remain in that state even if they could not imagine life differently.
K. had begun asking questions about the relationship between the monastery community and the garbage village. A gate with guards separates them. “Why are you guarding the monastery?” he asked. The answer came back quickly: “We are keeping the Muslims out.” Any Muslim would have to travel through the village to get to the monastery and one wonders why they would want to do so. Nevertheless, the answer was shocking. The long history of deep animosity between the Copts (the original Christians in Egypt whose history dates back to Mark, Jesus’ disciple) and the majority Muslims probably explains it (though it does not from our outsider perspective justify it). The Copts are a despised minority in the country. Even more disturbing was the phenomenon that so disgusted the Trekkers. The busloads of tourist/pilgrims pass right on by their fellow Copts’ distress in order to get to the monastery. Do they not see their plight? As one of the Trekkers wrote in his electronic journal, Westerners are not the only ones who lack the empathy for the poor. (My student’s ignorance about global urban poverty is another indication of how insulated we who are wealthy are from the pain of others, but how can I fault him in my own business-as-usual, day-to-day materialism?)
My article on reading Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses after 9/1l has just been published in Pro Rege. The primary conclusion I drew from this novel, so offensive to Muslims, is that it ought to drive its Christian readers back to scripture to discover there how we are to interact with them, especially those who are the immigrants of this world. (Rushdie claims that the novel is not a caricature of Islam but an exploration of the immigrant condition—he is less than candid about the first claim but so right about the second.) It propelled me to Hebrews. There in Hebrews 13:11-13 we see that we are to go with the suffering Jesus “outside the city gate bearing the disgrace he bore.” Mokattam is “outside the gate” where, as in Jesus’ day, the odor of burning refuse permeates everything. It is literally outside of St. Simon, outside of Cairo, and outside of the lives of the rich, whether they are Christian or not. Being in the garbage village for four days showed me how easy it is to write such words but how very difficult it is to live them. A few students, American and Egyptian, and some other volunteers are sharing in the sufferings of the people of Mokattam. How can I join them—if not literally myself? Or is such sharing only literal, physical? How can I not pass by on my way to religious services? How can I invite others, particulary Muslims, into the oasis of faith? How can we all rejoice as we make sure that Mokattam is not “an enduring city”? How shall we live as we are “looking for the city that is to come”?
posted by Barb @ 11:06 AM
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