From Refuse to Redemption: Hope Rising from Cairo’s Landfill

The work is demeaning, exhausting. And the smell: The smell is fetid, overpowering.

But the Christians in the city of 15 May, a southern suburb of Cairo, bend over and over to collect the city’s trash bare-handedly—for three to five dollars a day—because it’s nearly impossible for them to get jobs elsewhere. Their tiny income makes other housing unattainable.

But they don’t just take the trash to the dump. They live in the dump.

Their neighborhood hovers behind the city’s cemeteries, housing a thousand members of the Garbage Collectors Union—roughly 700 families who collect trash from four districts.

On any day of the week, others wade through layers of soiled diapers, wrappers, sanitary products, food waste—looking for something their own needs or something to sell. Dogs and children rummage at random.

Alongside clear issues of disease and sanitation, danger is an accepted fact of existence. Children trekking long distances to school, shortcutting through alleys, have been hit by oncoming trucks. And in 2020, floods snatched entire shacks, entire families.

Yet in the middle of the dump and its dwellings perches a pleasant, brick church. It daily gathers the  struggling families of 15 May.

Like everyone else, Adel wanted to get out. (Anyone who can get out, does.) But there within the stench of others’ refuse, God had other ideas: He wanted Adel to pastor the debilitated, often-forgotten families of 15 May.

Because He had most certainly not forgotten.

The God Who Sees—and Stays

Adel’s father, who is not a Christian, staunchly refused what appeared to be his son’s foolishness: It was insanity. How would his son pay his bills if he wouldn’t collect trash? He promptly threw Adel out. Adel packed his bags, went to church that night…and felt God prompting him to return home. His father relented, allowing Adel to stay. For years, Adel studied there for seminary via the light of a gas lamp.

The clear call of the God Who Sees (Genesis 16:13) could have meant effortless paths forward for the church Adel eventually planted. But it didn’t.

Promised, hopeful partnerships and funding for a destitute congregation led nowhere. Difficulties from those of other faiths meant extreme forms of discrimination—whether from teachers at school, to the boycotting of neighborhood shops, to lack of proper treatment in healthcare, to mistreatment by police.

It was in his church’s beleaguered state that Adel met Ashraf, an Egyptian Converge missionary who’s lived in the United States for decades, traveling back and forth to train and mentor Egyptian pastors. Ashraf, too, had far from an easy path as he sought out pastors with integrity, healthy intentions, and the self-discipline for genuine spiritual growth. He longed to lock arms with an Egyptian pastor of strong character and a true vision to reach their community.

The resulting partnership might be characterized, then, as slow: prayerful, patient, even hesitant. But their bond over their mutual vision grew steadily. 

The God Who Restores

Together with the church elders, Adel and Ashraf prayerfully devised a two-year plan: to first meet physical needs of the church for a year, and then, a year of meeting spiritual needs.

During year one, they aided families with food, clothing, cleaning and household supplies, school supplies, backpacks. (The congregation is largely comprised of women and children, due to overworked husbands and the temptation of substance abuse to escape painful realities.)

Converge also helped purchase a van for the congregation . So many needed to travel further distances than they could walk. Seniors needed transportation to medical care. The children, too, would be safer than in taking their perilous shortcuts.

Year two, of spiritual development for the church, involved five church revivals for five days each; conferences for Sunday school, youth, and leaders; and prayer meetings. Leadership witnessed significant maturing in the church body.

Ashraf remarks, “It was the first time in the history of this area just to go and to spend three of four days praying together, preaching, and people accepting Jesus at their Savior. It made a big jump in the churches spiritually-speaking.”

Adel praises God that many came to Christ and renewed their personal covenant with Him. “A strength we have [as a church] is that the church likes the Bible. We live the Word of God. So we have challenges around us—but what helps us overcome these challenges is that we are one church together and worship together.”

The God Who is More than Enough

Even with the outside help of the Converge partnership, Adel teaches robustly on giving, stewardship, and generosity to meet community needs. The initial funds to plant the church had come from church leadership. And Adel’s church gives to another church in a similar community.

“The vision of the church is ‘we are one family,’” Adel explains. “We love each other, minister together, complete each other’s weakness. What makes our church unique is we started as a family and continue as a spiritual family that supports and helps each other.”

In response to the community’s needs, Ashraf has founded Lift Your Eyes, a non-profit where people around the globe will be able to sponsor the needs of an entire family there. Adel, too, is seeking to construct a church in the new community to which the government is gradually relocating the trash collectors for safety reasons.

Ashraf and Adel trust God’s generosity—not unlike Paul’s collection in Corinth for the needy, persecuted church in Jerusalem: “You will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God” (2 Corinthians 9:11).

The God Who Rebuilds

The outside world may mark the trash-collecting community of 15 May by its offensive odor. But the church’s true is far more distinctive, eternal, and beautiful: “For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life” (2 Corinthians 2:15-16).

So the true triumph of this story, Adel insists, isn’t a church, a person, or even Converge. It’s the One who Himself was despised and rejected by humans (Isaiah 53:3). “Jesus is the hero. Jesus reached out and saved me and started this ministry. He brings partners in ministry, and He brings a real family—this church who serves God freely with the responsibility of carrying Jesus Christ to the community.”

Consider the lamp on a stand of Matthew 5, giving light to all in the house: “In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (v. 16).

Adel prays the hearers of his story would see what God’s calling them to, including the mysteries of place, partnership, and even obstacles to which they’re called to overcome.

And as the families in the kilometers of 15 May’s landfill life every burden in sacrificial generosity, God declares great promises: “your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in” (Isaiah 58:10, 12).