Summer Global Project: Cairo, Egypt: The Mokattam Project

This summer I spent five weeks in the garbage village of Mokattam, a part of Cairo, Egypt with a team of InterVarsity students from across the US.  God used this experience of living among the poor and oppressed to change the course of my life. 
It pains me to admit that before this experience I really did not care about issues of social justice, about poverty and oppression.  I’m a privileged, educated white guy from the suburbs, and poverty had no affect on me.  But in the Mokattam slum I lived among people who collect the garbage of Cairo and sort it in their homes.  They make less than US$5 each month.  I lived and ate and laughed and worked with these people.  I taught and played with their children, who have no hope of a brighter future because of the “C” (Christian) printed on their national ID card.  I experienced first-hand the injustices they accept, not knowing an alternative:  The boy who is considered “retarded” who could probably function normally with some basic speech therapy; the baby who would have lived at any hospital in the US, but died in the under-resourced care of the Mokattam hospital, and his mother who never got to hold her baby for the few hours he was alive because they had to completely knock her out to perform the C-Section.  Now I am committed to fighting injustice and poverty, because when I hear that word now I think of people I love, of Ayoub and Samaan, of Kerolos and Ranya.  Putting a face and a name on ‘poverty’ makes all the difference.
Through my experience in Cairo God has led me to a new kind of life.  When I graduate this spring I will be moving into an urban slum somewhere in America with a few other guys.  Sometimes changing the world is bringing hope to one neighbor stuck in cycles of poverty, bringing freedom to one addict, bringing relief to the teen mom across the street, bringing a community tighter than the neighborhood gangs.  That is my new vision — to live as the poor live, to walk where they walk, and in doing so to somehow bring the hope and light of the whole gospel into a dark and hopeless place.

- m a t t