Izbet Ruslan, a slum west of Alexandria that houses 30,000 residents, was once part of Alexandria’s so-called ‘vegetable basket’ due to its flourishing agricultural production. Today, Izbet Ruslan’s residents live in dilapidated huts and houses due to damaged sewage systems. They are surrounded by hills of trash and swarms of rodents, mice and insects, which spread dangerous diseases, according to residents and engineers studying the area’s decay.

Egyptian Darfur

Izbet Ruslan, a slum west of Alexandria that houses 30,000 residents, was once part of Alexandria’s so-called ‘vegetable basket’ due to its flourishing agricultural production. Today, Izbet Ruslan’s residents live in dilapidated huts and houses due to damaged sewage systems. They are surrounded by hills of trash and swarms of rodents, mice and insects, which spread dangerous diseases, according to residents and engineers studying the area’s decay.

Egyptian Darfur

Given these circumstances, residents call their area the ‘Egyptian Darfur’- the impoverished city in western Sudan. Children and adults move up and down the piles of garbage looking for plastic bottles, papers, cardboard and iron to fill them in large bags to be later sold to factories for L.E. 0.5 per kilo (US $.o6).

Stouhy, in his sixties, says he and his wife and children were born and raised in Karmouz neighborhood. Nearly 11 years ago, his house collapsed and he and his family suddenly found themselves living on the streets at the height of the cold and winter.

“We appealed to the governorate and the neighborhood, but no one did anything,” Stouhy says. “After two months of sleeping in the streets, I rented a shelter room here in Izbet Ruslan. Since then, we have been living under inhumane conditions because there are no services. There are no sewage systems, no drinking water networks and no life. We live in poverty.”

Sewage and contaminated water

“We are physically alive but morally dead,” says Mustafa Fattouh, a garbage digger. “We are deprived of our basic rights of tap drinking water. Water here is contaminated and mixed with sewage due to significant problems in the networks in the area. Tap water is yellow and it is loaded with dust. But we drink it because we cannot afford mineral water, which makes us and our children sick.”

Another resident Muhammad Ali says that the streets of Izbet Ruslan are drowned in foul-smelling sewage because the state sewage company has not provided sewage systems.

Previous vegetable basket

Mohammed Shahdan, a professor of urban planning at the Faculty of Engineering in Alexandria, says there are around 33 villages in the western part of Alexandria Governorate and almost half a million people live in them. Founded in the 1970s, these villages are called the ‘vegetable basket’ because they used to meet 60 percent of the needs of Alexandria and a number of nearby cities of vegetables, fruits and livestock.

A major problem these villages suffer from, he says, is mixing waste water with irrigation water and the sewage system is not connected to the main system of the governorate, which has aggravated the problem even further.

Reasons

Shahdan maintains that poverty, challenging economic conditions and collapsed buildings around the villages have turned them into resorts for the poor given their low rents and causing the villages to become slums. Moreover, the government has been negligent and failed to help the families who have lost their homes.

Spread of diseases

Resident Gamal Hanash says he has hepatitis because of all the contaminants where they live, his wife has kidney failure while his two children Muna, 10, and Ahmed, 15, have asthma.

“The price of our monthly medicines is nearly L.E. 3,000 (US $378), which we cannot afford,” he says. “Thankfully, philanthropists buy them for us.”

A way out

Shahdan believes it is difficult to resolve the crisis of slums, which are on the rise due to population growth, poor economic conditions and soaring housing prices, as well as the major problem of corrupt municipal officials.

“The state must remove the waste, exterminate the rodents and demolish the crumbling huts and buildings and provide temporary alternative accommodation until the completion of new housing units in the villages,” says Shadan. “The state has to save the poor and demand that Egyptian businessmen contribute to these buildings so as to promote social cohesion instead of relying on temporary painkilling solutions.”

Official response

“In the first phase, 300 out of 700 families from Kom Malh area in western Alexandria Governorate will be moved to safe and healthy residential units over the next month,” says Governor of Alexandria Engineer Muhammad Abduzzaher. “The governorate is buying these units from housing associations in order to provide a safe place for the poor.”

Abduzzaher says research is being conducted to examine all the slums in the governorate, learn the demands of residents and develop relevant reports.