2015 Sara Lafleur-Vetter

In the sprawling city of Cairo, the zabaleen — members of a minority Coptic Christian community — have made their living collecting and recycling trash for seven decades.

Sara Lafleur-Vetter, winner of the 2015 Dorothea Lange Fellowship, plans to use her $4,000 winnings for a project documenting the lives of the zabaleen —and the struggle between tradition and modernity in Egypt their story exemplifies.

The Graduate School of Journalism student says her interest in photography began at an early age. Growing up without her dad, who died when she was two, Lafleur spent a lot of time “flipping through the photo albums, National Geographic images and slides he took on his travels in the Navy,” she says.

She developed an early interest in world cultures as well. At her Quaker high school outside Philadelphia, a history teacher who spoke Russian piqued her interest in all things Russian. “I was blown away by the language,” Lafleur recalls.

At Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, she majored in anthropology and Russian and did a semester in St. Petersburg — where she returned later to do a photo series on NGOs that serve homeless children and adults with disabilities.

On another project abroad — photographing for an archeological excavation project in Luxor, on the Nile — Lafleur began learning Arabic, which (bolstered by additional study) will serve her as she interacts with Egypt’s zabaleen.

In the past, Lafleur notes, the Egyptian government provided the zabaleen with a modest stipend for their work collecting Cairo’s trash (using trucks and donkeys), then sorting it in their neighborhood and selling or utilizing the material. Under this system, the zabaleen efficiently recycled 80 percent of the city’s waste.

“A decade ago,” says Lafleur, “the Mubarak regime placed waste collection in the hands of four corporate firms, cutting 65,000 zabaleen out the process.” How this resilient community is regrouping — by working both within and outside the new system — is something she hopes to document with her camera.

Photo Gallery

Man sitting on a bench

Person in wheelchair asleep

person sitting facedown in chair

Figure with doll on table

Man on rolling platform in hallway

Screaming child in crib

Nurse bending over child in toy car

Bottle of hypodermic needles

Child in wheelchair staring

Figure looking out the window

Child looking back at viewer

Child with brain tumor

Project Proposal

Nestled in the sprawling capital of Egypt, the zabaleen, members of a minority Coptic Christian community, have made their living going door to door collecting, separating, and recycling the city's trash for the past 70 years. While most Western garbage collecting companies only achieve a 25 percent recycling rate, the zabaleen maximized efficiency-recycling 80 percent of the waste in Cairo-a city of 11 million people1.

Historically, the government gave the zabaleen a modest stipend to handle the city's trash. They collected it on trucks and donkey carts, sorted it in their neighborhood, sold it to factories and wholesales, and fed the remainders to their pigs.

A decade ago, the delicate balance of the zabaleen system was upset. The Mubarak regime placed waste collection in the hands of four corporate firms, cutting 65,000 zabaleen out of the process. Resilient as they were, the zabaleen continued to collect the trash from towering high-rise buildings, but for a fraction of the income. The zabaleen now had to compete with middlemen, NGOs and foreign corporations-literally over scraps.

Now, some zabaleen are starting to work within the system-gaining official status and protection as well as vehicles and uniforms. Others continue to work outside the corporate structure.

I propose a series of environmental portraits that document the zabaleen from Fall 2015 through Spring 2016. Looking through the window of this marginal population, I plan to show the struggle between tradition and modernity in Cairo and explore the environmental problems and solutions suggested by their experience. This story is about people-proud, innovative and resilient, but it is also about process-how top-down efforts towards progress sometimes inhibit organic human-scale efficiency. I hope to bring the same intimacy and rawness of my previous work.

I worked for a year and a half in Luxor and speak basic Arabic. I would use the summer to advance my Arabic and arrange a fixer to allow me access back to this community that I was fortunate enough to visit in 2010.

Sara Lafleur-Vetter
December 4, 2014

1The IWPAR Project (Project for Informal Waste Pickers and Recyclers)