Never did I think I could learn so much about the intricacies of Egyptian society and culture through the story of one of its garbage collectors. Sayyid Ahmed’s story in Tales of the Trash starts off with an amalgamation of unassuming interactions between him and journalist Peter Hessler. Each week, trash collector (or ‘zabaleen’) Sayyid makes visits to Hessler’s home, dissipating his trash from existence from the fire escape beside his front door before the break of dawn.

Sayyid is illustrated as an eccentric and illiterate middle-aged man existing in one of the most fascinating informal city infrastructures I’ve ever encountered. As an uncontracted garbage collector, Sayyid is not paid by any government or private organization; he operates mainly on tips. And yet, he brings in more than $500USD monthly to his family, more than twice the average monthly earnings in Cairo. While his illiteracy forces him to ask his neighbors to read out messages from his wife or labels on counterfeit sex drugs (Sayyid’s striking fixation on women and sex, as the piece offers a deep dive into, reveals a swath of insights on Egyptian culture), Sayyid’s attunement to his physical presentation and his surroundings is apparent. He dresses very poorly, for example, because he knows that residents are more likely to tip the more destitute he appears. In a kind of strange semblance to OSINT, Sayyid uses the trash he collects from residents to make inferences about their lives: the regular appearance of two syringes a day in one resident’s home, for example, implied that he had diabetes; discarded bank letters and pornographic magazines from an elderly sex-crazed diplomat revealed his wealth and sexual preferences in detail.

I was fascinated by how Hessler structured the story in such a way that Sayyid’s story bridged to larger insights about Egyptian culture and history. The zabaleen system, for example, emerged from a wave of migration of Copic Christians in the 30s who sold pork and became contracted waste recyclers. In the late 2000s, however, political unrest destabilized the system, in part contributing to the excess of trash that became highly visible in the city. Hessler in many ways accomplished what I want to do in my own profile, situating the story of one man’s life in the wider context of the political, historical, and social shfits that shaped the personal lives of its residents. In ephemeral bursts of scenes and conversations he has with Sayyid, Hessler wove together a story not just of one person but an entire nation. I would love to combine this kind of ‘interwoven’ storytelling with the striking visuality and description used in Deb’s piece. Each scene was described with so much life and color — her writing allowed me to vividly see the image of the dance floor or the faces of the women. The almost mystical description of the scene sharply contrasted with the dark destitution faced by the women and children, forced into prostitution to support themselves and their family. With the combination of vivid storytelling and politico-historical contextualization, I hope to write about Hesham’s story of escape from the Syrian war with vivid and honest detail.