CAIRO: Walid Adly is 18 and has a fifth grade education. And he’s darn proud of it.
He is one of Egypt’s 2.76 million working children forced to postpone their schooling to provide for their families.
Many children have to forego schooling altogether to supply up to a quarter of their family’s monthly income, according to Unicef. The lack of education nearly guarantees a continuing cycle of poverty.
In rural areas, children pick cotton, tan leather and help care for livestock. In the cities, they collect garbage, make pottery and sell trinkets to tourists.
“Eighty percent of working street children have never been to school, says Abla El-Badry, a child rights activist.
Some, like Adly, get lucky. Perhaps as many as 6,000 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have stepped up to offer working kids a chance at an education.
Some programs offer literacy classes at convenient times for working kids. Others provide job skills training. And others still provide an expressive outlet for the strains and frustrations working children experience.
“From my experience, these children have lots of good skills, El-Badry says. “They have very strong persistence and determination. Investing in these children will result in fruitful consequences.
While the 2003 child labor laws stipulate mandatory elementary education for children 14 year-old and younger, enforcement is lax, leaving millions of children not only working in some of the worst jobs in Egypt, but also getting little education.
The Ministry of Manpower and Migration, the body responsible for enforcing child labor laws, refused to comment on this issue. Adly is a garbage collector who lives at the base of the Muqattam Hills in Cairo. The uniform brown apartment buildings of the neighborhood of the Zabaleen – garbage collectors – are speckled with green and orange tiled balconies and protruding bricks in the shape of the square Coptic cross.
The dusty air makes the overpowering, omnipresent reek of refuse nearly visible. The garbage collectors make their living by recycling about 95 percent of Cairo’s rubbish. The dirt streets of the village are narrowed by towering heaps of the trash produced by the city’s nearly 20 million people. Bags of rotting garbage spill out of homes and into the streets, making them practically impassable amid the traffic of donkey carts and rumbling garbage trucks.
Several hundred yards into the sprawling neighborhood is Spirit of Youth for Environmental Services, a boys’ school that caters to the poorest of the Zabaleen. Colorful murals cover the walls of the center fusing Bible verses with pictures of shampoo bottles and garbage collecting.
Adly is a graduate of the school, founded in 2000 by Laila Iskandar.
The boys work three half-days a week collecting Pert Plus, Pantene, Dove and Sun Silk shampoo bottles. Proctor & Gamble and Unilever pay the boys LE 0.15 to LE 0.30 piasters per bottle to collect and shred the plastic so they cannot be refilled with fake shampoo.
The other half of each day the boys are taught math, reading, writing and computer skills, using the shampoo bottles as teaching tools. They earn about LE 200 a month.
Adly spent five years finishing his Spirit schooling. When he was younger he dreamed of becoming a banker, but currently buys glass bottles from other garbage collectors to be broken and melted down for recycling.
He says he focuses on insulin bottles because he does not want to see diabetics sold counterfeit insulin, and earns about LE 400 a month.
He’s had to lower his goals a bit, despite his education, and now plans to be a chauffeur because he knows that will pay much more than bottle collection. In order to apply for a driver’s license in Egypt a person must have an elementary education completion certificate, which Adly can now produce.
Until then, he plans to start teaching at Spirit of Youth.
“I learned and I want to deliver what I’ve learned to other people, Adly says.
He says that academic degrees are not as important to a poor family as having money; a sentiment shared by most working children. Starving off hunger is more essential than learning to read.
Down the road from Spirit of Youth, past a crush of garbage trucks bringing in the first of two daily hauls of garbage, a pig wallowing in a mud puddle in the middle of the street and the decaying carcass of a donkey, the NGO’s sister operation, the Association for the Protection of the Environment (APE) is located inside a painted gate.
The area is an oasis: there is no garbage piled inside their gate. Here, teenage girls learn to make paper, weave carpets and bags out of rags, or make patchwork quilts.
Throughout the school, the sounds of sloshing water from the paper recycling plant and the clacking of wooden looms, mingled with the tinkling of girlish laughter, resonate.
More than 500 girls and women have trained at the facility, which also provides literacy classes and a child-care center.
The goal is to give girls marketable skills, so they don’t have to sort garbage all their lives. They can purchase looms or sewing machines on a payment plan and work from home.
Since traditionally men and boys collect garbage and women and girls sort it, they are all at risk of contracting Hepatitis B and C. The diseases are already present in 30 to 50 percent of the Egyptian population and are higher among the Zabaleen.
The APE complex, therefore, also includes a health screening facility, which tests mainly for hepatitis. So far this year, they have tested 1,481 people for the disease. The clinic also provides vaccines and health and safety awareness training.
Far from the stench of the Muqattam Hills on a quiet leafy street in Downtown Cairo, the Townhouse Gallery nestles in an aging European-looking building.
But every week the quiet is shattered by the shouts and laughter of 40 kids. The gallery sponsors an art camp for working children to provide them with a bit of fun and a creative outlet. Through painting, animation, theater and sculpting sessions, working kids get a break from the monotony of daily work.
“We’ve changed a lot of them, says Belal Nassar, a social worker and employee of the gallery, referring to the kids’ improved behavior and growing appreciation of art. “Most kids in their area want to come [to the camp] because they see the change.
Every Friday, a large gallery space is cleared to make way for screaming children and volunteers and social workers to play tug of war, tag and cooperation-learning games so the kids can burn off excess energy.
They are also offered optional classes that teach them about their rights as laborers or basic literacy.
In the literacy class one week, a dozen kids gather around a small chalkboard while Belal Nassar helps them write the letters of the Arabic alphabet. Several children stand and recite the alphabet. When they finish, usually with a little help from Nassar, they are greeted with applause and cheering.
Later, in a third-floor room with high doors that open to a balcony looking out over the neighborhood’s tangle of apartments, the children who have chosen the animation workshop spend the better part of each Friday carefully drawing on construction paper to make the scenery and characters for short movies. These stories are typically about their daily lives and homes, says Nassar.
Nasser also teaches a clay workshop. His current project with several of the boys is sculpting human faces and bodies in what will eventually become a display at Townhouse.
The reddish mud quickly stains their hands as they work and the clay faces soon reflect the deep concentration of the boys.
“I love teaching the kids something useful and to change something [about them], Nassar says.
The camp occasionally inspires kids to return to school. “I was so happy when three kids who dropped out of school went back, he says. Additional reporting by Ethar Shalaby.
