Wake Up Call!!

I really hate posting ugly pictures of Egypt when there is so much beauty here, but every now and then I have to in hopes of helping people care for our country. The government (old government) built an extension of the Ring Road to connect the end of the Moneeb coming from Kattameya to the part of the ring road that circled around to the north of the city. Originally the road was intended to go around behind the Giza Plateau but UNESCO blocked that route arguing that the construction was not good in an antiquities area. Just last fall someone put up some tent material along the canal just where the extension took off from ground level and began dumping garbage there. Now every day trucks come and dump load after load of smelly gross garbage under the overpass while bulldozers dig it up again and put it in big trucks to move somewhere else instead.

All of this is incredibly stupid. Instead of investing money in the Zebaleen who recycle roughly 80% of the waste they collect, we are paying people to move it around in trucks, using gasoline and polluting the air further. And it goes to landfills, which as might be expected, FILL UP!

Brushing Things Aside

It isn't easy to keep things clean when you live in the middle of the world's biggest sandbox. We are surrounded by desert in Cairo and it blows in with every breeze. We have the normal plastic brooms, but also make some interesting local ones. These are garden brooms made from the stems of the dates that are harvested every fall.

Recycling Paper Can Be Fun

Almost every little boy in North America voices the opinion at some point that the best job in the world is that of the garbage man because the garbage man gets to ride on the OUTSIDE of the truck. Imagine if they could see the boys on the paper recycling truck riding not just on the outside but on top.

Cleaning Up After Work?

I ride in the desert a lot and I try to respect the rules of the Antiquities Council. We avoid areas where the archaeologists are working, we don't mess about with the antiquities and we never, never leave trash behind if we are riding. Lunch trash goes out with the horses. I just wish the Antiquities Council had the same respect for the desert that we do. These are piles of debris from excavations as well as piles of simple garbage that people at the Sakkara pyramids area have seen fit to dump in the desert. Maybe they figure that since it isn't by the road inside the tourist area it doesn't count? I think that it does.

Trash Collection Take Two

If the government of a city believes that having a group of people whose lives are devoted to the collection and recycling of trash is old fashioned, even if the Ford Foundation believes otherwise, they will likely bring in "modern" techniques. In our case, the city of Giza took a large section of desert between Giza and Sakkara and moved in a dump and recycling plant. Now thanks to willy nilly modernisation we have to put up with enormous trucks hauling in massive loads of refuse along our country roads, a road into the desert cutting the old trails from Giza to Sakkara and making life for riders that much more hazardous, a black pile of refuse that is creeping up to the wadi leading to the Sakkara complex, (a valley still unexplored and containing a number of antiquities sites), and the various aerial byproducts of a dump for a few million people. These include armies of plastic bags that roll inflated in ranks across the desert on windy days and the occasional smoke cloud when something goes wrong and catches fire.

I think I like the old ways better.