By Yasmine Fathi Inhabitants of Muselhi Street, Gheit Al-Enab, a district of Karmouz in Alexandria, have had to deal with excessive waste for five years. They say it all started with Onyx, a French company, disposing of waste in an empty lot located behind the train tracks, at the edge of Muselhi Street. The first foreign company to work in waste management in Egypt, Onyx is responsible for collecting household waste, cleaning streets and beaches, providing and emptying garbage containers. Ahmed El-Qazzaz, one Muselhi Street store owner, tells the story in this way: "Everyday we see the Onyx vehicle dumping waste right before our eyes, in broad daylight. They don't even bother to spray it with bactericides." Consequences include, as well as an odour made all the more unbearable by the summer heat, a mosquito epidemic that spares no one; mosquito bite marks, indeed, are now among the defining characteristics of Gheit Al-Enab residents; and some of them end up in hospital due to diseases thus contracted. "Look," Abu Amal displays red blotched arms. "I just came back from hospital. Those mosquitoes -- so huge they can bite you through your socks." Mohamed El-Abd agreed: "I had to take my 18-month-old son to hospital. They told me he has microbes in his stomach; I wonder where those came from." Ali Hassan pointed out that he has to remove mosquitoes from his tea every morning: "While my son sleeps they are all over his face and in his mouth." Many residents have had to move in with relations. According to El-Qazzaz, complaints filed to the city council, the People's Assembly and even the mayor in person fell on deaf ears. According to Omar Ahmed, the mayor said, in response, "But where else?" Yet Hassan Abaza, business development and communication director of Onyx, denied all such charge, insisting that the company only ever disposes of waste in one of two insulated underground "sanitary dumps" in Borg Al-Arab and the town of Al-Hammam. Otherwise waste is recycled in three factories in the north, south and at the centre of Alexandria: "Even organic waste is made into fertilisers that we sell -- the demand for them is actually quite high." The troubled spot in Gheit Al-Enab, he explained, is but a transfer station in which waste is kept only temporarily: small vehicles that cannot travel the 70km distance to the sanitary dump place it there for larger vehicles to pick up -- a mechanical, tightly regulated and speedy process, according to Abaza, that leaves no chance for mosquitoes to gather: "Actually garbage can never be a cause for mosquitoes. It can attract flies. Mosquitoes are only drawn to stagnant water, as in Lake Maryout, not by garbage." He blamed the situation in Gheit Al-Enab, rather, on informal garbage collectors among the residents who sort through containers looking for paper, plastic and maybe bread: "The latter they give to animals to eat, hence the smell of rot." Abaza becomes exasperated: garbage is thrown out all day, so it stays overnight until company employees sweep the area the next morning; and company containers are stolen -- "up to 50 a day". Yet the residents in question deny all such charges, refusing to believe that they are responsible for the situation. The fact that the "transfer station" receives most of the near-by hospital's waste compounds the situation even further. "Used cottonwool and syringes everywhere," said Yehia Ahmed. "What if a child walks over them -- and what if they're contaminated?" Residents continue to await a solution. "We don't even mind if they even burn it," El Qazzaz says. "The smoke may hurt our lungs, but it will never be as humiliating as the situation we're in now."
