Many things in Egypt don’t work very well.

Traffic is bad, and trains get

cancelled; during the summer, it’s not unusual to have five electricity
blackouts in a single day. One year, we couldn’t buy bottled water for
months, because the plant that produced the water somehow caught fire.
Since we moved into the apartment, the country has cycled through three
constitutions, three Presidents, four Prime Ministers, and more than
seven hundred members of parliament. But there hasn’t been a single
day when the trash wasn’t cleared outside my kitchen door. As a whole,
Cairo’s waste-collection system is surprisingly functional, considering
that it’s largely informal. In a sprawling, chaotic city of more than
seventeen million, zabaleen like Sayyid have managed to develop one of
the most efficient municipal recycling networks in the world.