My brother and sister-in-law (Westerners) lived in Cairo for a few years and tell a similar humorous story. They too would just set their trash and unwanted items out in the hall where it would quickly disappear.
Once my sister-in-law put out some clothes that included an old T-Shirt that had been printed for a family get-together celebrating her parents 50th anniversary. It had a large photo of her parents on it along with wording like "John and Mary's 50th anniversary" etc. etc. She thought nothing of it. But several days later while walking near their apartment, she was taken aback to see an Egyptian man coming toward them proudly wearing the T-shirt with her parents smiling photo on it.
And it seemed this was his favorite or only shirt. For months afterword, she'd see her parent's photo as the man went about his business in the neighborhood. She took it all in stride!
Some people attach more emotional value to items like that. Some don't. I did for a long time. After a lot of big changes I kind of stopped hording things as much and it was very freeing.
I used to never ever get rid of gifts, even if I no longer had any use for them and they were just contributing to clutter. It seemed so ungrateful.
Then I had to get rid of a lot of stuff during a very fraught move, and I thought: someone gave me this because they love me and want me to be happy. Would that person want me to obsessively, guiltily cling to something that doesn't benefit me anymore? No. They'd want me to get rid of it.
When I read this, my first thought was "wow, this must have been really hard to anonymize, if he wasn't careful to remove/change enough details people could figure out who the garbage man is".
Well, not so much...
> So of course Sayyid was aware that I was researching and writing about him. At the same time, he is not literate, so there are serious limitations on his understanding of something like a New Yorker story.
> I also considered whether to change his name or not use a photograph. But I don’t like to do that unless there are serious political risks. Inevitably, changing a name reduces the reality of the subject, and there’s more of a risk that the person comes across as a symbol or something half-real.
Yeah, it’s a stretch to say using an alias makes it less real or using a ruckenfigur picture takes away from the story. If the law allows for witness protection via alias, I can’t see something less real or genuine.
As someone else had pointed out this man may not realize or care about the consequences of the publicity but the author does have a duty to care and I think he betrayed that duty here.
I'm trying to figure this out: What, specifically, is the duty you think he betrayed?
It's pretty obviously not the case that authors have a duty to anonymize everybody they write about — I've never even heard a serious argument to that effect.
Hessler said he considered whether there was likely to be negative consequences for Sayyid if he was identified in the story, and he didn't see any likelihood of that. There don't appear to have actually been negative consequences (at least, nobody has mentioned any), so it's hard make a strong case for negligence on that front.
So, to me a lot of what he (the sanitation worker) did wasn’t “official”. Also, he scavenged (and maybe it’s lucrative to him, if so it might interest others). It also mentions he does not observe religious orthodoxy. Someone could come along and try and argue he’s not fit for the job or worse.
It’s like when writing s story about people on the periphery of society and most writers use pseudonyms for their subjects. It’s good courtesy and good practice.
I think you have a good thinking about journalistic practice here.
It might mitigate hypothetical undesirable effects, in this case, to articulate some of the effect of the article on readers for whom the article was intended.
For one example, for me, as a citizen of the US, where this article was published, I enjoyed this article, and it fostered a favorable impression of Cairo, by humanizing one of its people. In a movie, he would be a beloved character. I realize he is of humble circumstances, among a diversity of people in Cairo (we have such diversity in my own US city, too). I am glad he exists, and that his society permits him to find his own greatness of role, in his way. This gives me an impression of Cairo as good people, with whom to feel fellowship, a desire to travel there and to otherwise learn about and appreciate their culture, and with whom to have good international relations and engage in business/trade. I would be troubled to ever hear that any harm has come to this person, or that he has become unhappy.
oh wow that's an astonishingly wholesome take on it. and now that i think about it, one that is quite resonant with my own experience of it in retrospect. it was certainly an extremely humanizing piece and i think in that regard, it's doing one of the most noble honors (at least in my moral framework): striving to eliminate xenophobia. so much in this world tries to divide us by our national identity and our ethnicities, etc, but at the end of the day, we are all just one species, and any difference that we perceive physically is just a side effect of phenotype expression, and any other more abstract difference such as belief, etc, is a side effect of the culture and society surrounding that phenotypical substrate. we work so hard to divide ourselves from our core nature, which is to cooperate and seek novelty, so it's quite cathartic to see a piece that tries to eliminate a substantial contributor to that division.
this is certainly accurate. without the presence of the xenophobia in the first place, there would be no means to appreciate it when people manage to transcend it. and xenophobia obviously exists on a biological and instinctual level and has been selected for for a reason so it obviously serves a purpose, it's just a problem when it overactivates. it's all about balance and understanding that just because you feel a certain way, doesn't mean that you have to put it out there on the world
It sounds like Sayyid knew about the story and it doesn't sound like Sayyid is trying to maintain any sort of anonymity, so what is the ethical problem you see here?
Peter Hessler's books about contemporary China are super-interesting reading. He's a very low-key, but deeply informed cultural translator. In all his books, he focuses on the stories and lives of the people he meets and gets to know, first as a young Peace Corps volunteer, and then as a journalist living in the country for many years. If you're interested, maybe start with _Country Driving: A Journey from Farm to Factory_.
Haven't read this yet, but it reminded me of a very interesting RT Documentary on the life of an Egyptian garbage collector a few years back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0s7WsoC528
>During subsequent conversations with Sayyid, I learned that the Reuters correspondent who lived upstairs paid only 30 a month, which made me feel good about my decision. It seemed logical that a long-form magazine writer would produce more garbage than somebody who worked for a wire service.
I guess I'll get in trouble for saying this again. He is compelling and be speaks Arabic blah blah blah, but I feel these articles are more about him than Sayyid, over which we haggle with him vicariously over Egyptians pounds, approximately seventeen to one US dollar now. I know that feeling, but I wouldn't even ironically brag about paying fifty cents over the other wealthy foreigner a month. I would saying something here ironically in cutesy Egyptian Arabic and explain it, but I'd be my own worst enemy.
I have to visit often for family reasons, and they are the reason I avoid being more engaged about being outspoken over there about what goes on. I feel as a westerner we have passively let Egypt totally devolved and we should feel ashamed; these lip service articles only assuage personal guilt, as I see it. I dreamed of being a Hessler and now ashamed I am part of the clique when I visit old friends.
I know I'll go get down-voted for saying it, but oh well.
I would strongly encourage everyone here to visit, and go beyond what tourist books tell you. You cannot freely write on the details of the place anymore, and I learned the most about life from Egypt.
I feel you read a bit too much into all this. The guy is a journalist and his wife as well. I suspect they don't make much money from their job so they have to be a bit careful on how they spend it. And knowing they pay a bit more compared to some other Western guy in their apartment complex ... well, I feel most people would feel better about themselves as well given the circumstance. I feel it's just human nature. From his story it's clear it's hard to figure out the "proper" amount of pay, there are no clearly set rules.
I did find his writing compelling and added the book to my Amazon Wishlist.
In the past I visited Egypt once through a more adventurous travel agency. It was still an organised trip, but I was happy to see quite a bit of Egypt which included sleeping in the desert, sleeping in an oasis, have a small boat trip on the Nile, eat dinner with a Nubian family, visit the archeological museum and most important mosque in Cairo, as well as an important coptic church. And did see all the well known attractions such as the pyramids, valley of kings, Luxor, etc... It was fun and I'd love to visit it again in the future, but I feel it's currently probably too unsafe. Even back in 2005 when I visited there were military escorts with out travel group as we travelled to the south.
I visit 3 to 5 times a year. It's not that unsafe, in Cairo at least, as police reaction forces roll around in Jeeps and I have never seen people want to make such a fuss to get their attention; foreigners used to be interesting but stuff is so bad I feel tourism took a nosedive and over the years people don't bother foreigners has less of a payout and nothing really matters anymore. I feel the big cities must have more risk, unless we are talking Sinai where people are actively fighting the military and Egyptians not directly in that zone avoid.
Westerners continue to make vastly more than local counterparts, and those 40 pounds buy less in 2007 than they did in 2019 (6LE:1USD,17.8LE:1USD, it was even crazier for foreigners when black market currency flowed freely and was stopped violently, including dragging exchange owners and seizures by police in ... 2018). Letting foreigners say stuff like this and rationalize it is part of how we helped passively ruin it.
You are right. I do read a lot into it, but stuff like this has been bothersome to me for what you can guess is 10+ years now. That we all go wow, look at this foreigner's insight into Cairene culture in 2019 with pieces like this just makes me sad.
Those organized trips are fun, but it limits the people and experiences you have. I understand we gave limited time on this planet and vacations in foreign countries are scary and uncomfortable so the effort and risk/reward is high unless you're a crazy person like yours truly.
I said elsewhere I will read his Chinese stuff and have my sinologist friends read it with me too see if it similar and I overreact.
It feels weird to see a journalist republishing the same content just like that, but my guess is he has his book to promote and not that many angles to introduce the topic.
So I wasn't just paranoid when I used to shred all my papers at home before throwing them away.
Related, when I moved out, I sold/freecycled most of my stuff, then invited some people to take what they want from the leftovers and finally left the stuff nobody had wanted in a big box in the bin room downstairs. Minutes later I saw the building cleaners haul the entire box into a car.
>"Garbage collection" redirects here. For the automatic memory management technique, see Garbage collection (computer science). For other uses, see Garbage collection (disambiguation).
You can almost hear the eyeroll directed at programmers :-p
The first time I saw the article in the list I interpreted it correctly. And then this time I decided to click on the comments and found myself wondering whether it was some clever wordplay about the graphics library.
... funny. My first thought was actually Egypt and actual garbage because of how absurd a leap it would be, then figured it must be Cairo the OS or some other more likely Cairo.
Same. I've been messing with Xlib/XCB/Cairo/etc for the past few weeks and it's all I've been thinking about lately. I guess if you use the Xlib/XCB backends for Cairo surfaces then you would get some sort of GC on the Xorg server side.
Well - I read the domain name as a pun on Github of a new open source community featuring literate programming languages, of which a particularly new one named Cairo had a fully correct GC.
It took me almost a minute to adjust all my assumptions. Well executed nerd snipe.
I came to this article hoping to learn something about public policy, esp. regarding privacy. Whatever insights into those topics there might be are too buried in story for me to find them easily so I stopped reading.
When you do not have a publicly-funded garbage collection infrastructure, then the private enterprises that fill in those gaps can, and will, make use of any physical or informational resources they find in the trash they pick up in an effort to make a decent living. Examples given include "a nice camera", "drugs", "porn", and "knowing exactly how much money an ambassador is making". There are no examples given involving blackmail but I feel that's definitely an elephant sitting in the room of this story of one journalist's relationship with one private garbage collector.
Now that I put it that way I feel like this is the core of a good argument for nationalizing social media.
It's not obvious to me that I should trust the government more than a big corporation with a reputation to defend. If Google was found to be leaking credit card details, for example, it would at least cost them a ton of business (and maybe do much more harm than that). They have the wherewithal to avoid it. The incentives for long-term investment in security infrastructure are weaker in government.
> If Google was found to be leaking credit card details, for example, it would at least cost them a ton of business
Would it? I can't think of a single case where this has actually happened. It's great in theory and all, but it is far from reality.
The biggest data breaches over the past century have been with giant companies that are still known today. Yahoo, Marriott, Adult Friend Finder, eBay, Equifax, Heartland Payment Systems, Target, TJX, Uber, JP Morgan Chase, the US OPM, Sony's PSN network, Anthem, RSA, Home Depot and Adobe are all still in business, and for some of them, the lack of repercussions have been staggering (looking at you, Equifax).
Granted, not all are credit card breaches specifically, but several are, and in all cases a lot of personally identifiable information was stolen.
The fact someone calls a story literature does not imply someone else could not benefit from a third party's bullet points. If you like stories, don't worry; it's not an endangered art form.
Nothing to worry about, I just didn't feel there is much to lift off the story beyond its literary value. It is a bunch of small stories about ordinary folks told from the point of view of a foreigner.
Once my sister-in-law put out some clothes that included an old T-Shirt that had been printed for a family get-together celebrating her parents 50th anniversary. It had a large photo of her parents on it along with wording like "John and Mary's 50th anniversary" etc. etc. She thought nothing of it. But several days later while walking near their apartment, she was taken aback to see an Egyptian man coming toward them proudly wearing the T-shirt with her parents smiling photo on it.
And it seemed this was his favorite or only shirt. For months afterword, she'd see her parent's photo as the man went about his business in the neighborhood. She took it all in stride!