One of the most remarkable examples of Christian hope for the poor is taking place among the residents of garbage dumps in Cairo, Egypt.
The poor people live in seven dilapidated villages within the dumps on the outskirts of Cairo. Each night, from midnight until dawn, fathers and sons ride through the city of 14 million people in trucks or donkey carts collecting thousands of tons of garbage. Younger children come along to guard the loads.
The trash is then transported back to the dumps where it is deposited into the centre of the family home. Women and girls rummage through its disease-infested contents to find food and materials to be recycled, including metal, plastic and paper. Bones are set aside to make glue. EN talked to one woman who has been there, who describes the smell as almost unbearable.
But despite the filth, terrible smell and deprivation, there is hope. Many residents of the dumps have come into a living faith in Christ, gaining spiritual strength and initiative to better their lives. With aid from Christians elsewhere in the world, especially the USA, residents of the dumps have developed schools, health clinics, a hospital, vocational training and a recycling plant for paper and cloth. A village behind Muqattam Mountain in the dump area to the east of the city has 300,000 residents, of whom it is estimated 90% are Christians, involved with a Bible-centred ministry of the Coptic Orthodox church.
A remarkable story
In his book Moving mountains, John Waters, has chronicled the background to this remarkable story.
It seems that in the early years of this century, there was a migration of poor Coptic Christian families from Upper Egypt into Cairo. Many of these people, known as the 'zeballeen', were engaged in rubbish collection. Their Muslim supervisors were forbidden by Islamic law to touch pork or come into contact with pigs, but as Christians, the newcomers were free to do this. They could therefore supplement their income from rubbish-collecting by keeping pigs that were fed on the food scraps. The largest of the 'zeballeen' districts is Manshiyat Nasir, which was created in 1969 when the governor of Cairo had thousands of rubbish collectors moved to the east of the city on the lower slopes of the Muqattam Mountain.
There was a young couple living in the Shubra district of Cairo. Farahat and his wife Su'aad, who worked in their spare time for the Coptic Orthodox Church, struck up a friendship with Qiddees, one of the young rubbish collectors. Farahat was used to speaking in the country churches on Sundays and soon Qiddees asked him: 'Come and speak to my people about Christ. The people in our neighbourhood gamble, drink too much, use guns, take drugs - there are so many problems.' Eventually, in February 1974 - after much hesitation - Farahat felt that God was telling him that he must go.
Running and miracles
This led to the first meeting of a church in a corrugated iron building among the rubbish collectors. Soon the Lord was beginning to save people. The following year, Farahat's wife, Su'aad started a school in the area with two kindergarten classes.
Many of the people who Farahat went to had never heard of Christ although they were nominally Copts. They didn't want to listen to what he had to say. Often he knocked on doors only to find that no one would answer them. If he did get into a house, he often found people sitting around drinking. They would take one look at him and run away. Yet Farahat felt that the Holy Spirit was saying: 'Run after them!' He did just that on many occasions. He came to the conclusion that persistence really was what God was looking for.
Farahat discovered what he would call an evangelism led by the Holy Spirit. Once, he was called to pray for someone. There was no electricity in the area at that time and Farahat couldn't see the person very well. He didn't know what was wrong with him, but when Farahat had prayed, the man shouted out: 'My eyes are opened. I was blind and now I can see.' Farahat had no idea that the man had been blind, but it appears that the man really had been healed.
It was with such strange and dynamic events among these very poor people that the ministry began to grow. In 1978, Farahat was ordained, becoming Father Simaan. John Waters writes: 'The crucial thing for Father Simaan is that as you read the Word of the Lord and pray, the Holy Spirit comes and fills you . . .' 'Ministry in the flesh is of no benefit,' avers Father Simaan, 'but the most important element in ministry which makes it succeed is the Holy Spirit, who is in you and me.''
Cave church
In 1986, a unique church building was opened in the middle of the dumps. Samaan El Kharaz Cave Church is built in an open-air cave on the Muqattam Mountain. It seats 20,000 people, making it the largest building for Christian worship in the Middle East, and now has a modern sound system and closed-circuit television.
The Cave Church draws people from many different backgrounds - evangelicals, Orthodox and Catholics. Father Simaan wears the garb of a Coptic priest, prays for the sick and preaches a message of Christian repentance that sounds like Billy Graham, according to those who have attended the services. As many as 8,000 garbage workers, as well as others from Cairo, come for weeknight Bible studies.
Life-changing
Another friend of EN visited the church in the early 1990s and enjoyed the experience. However, later the same day, he was sitting in another church in a different part of Cairo and suddenly realised that he smelt terrible and felt he should go and wash as a service to the other worshippers.
But a trip to the dump is 'a life-changing experience, especially for those who are accustomed to the affluence of the United States', Stan Cross, an American who visited the church in 1997 while working for an international ministry, told Religion Today. His van passed 'dilapidated old structures, mounds of garbage and clouds of flies' as it wound through streets and villages.
The Cave church, accessible by a single road, rises up over the garbage village as a sheer rock wall, Cross said. 'As I walked up and peered into the cave, I was overwhelmed. Rising above a filthy, smelly garbage dump is one of the most amazing, if not the most amazing, church in the world.'
'What a picture of God's grace,' said Cross. 'What a picture of 'blessed are the poor'. It is hard to exaggerate the significance and power in the startling contrasts.
JEB
Information for this article came mainly from Religion Today and John Waters' book, Moving mountains (Triangle, £6.99, ISBN 0 281 05098 8).
Dr John Benton
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