1. Marina of the
Zabbaleen
Report By: Angel Lahoz

2. The Zabbaleen People
 The Zabbaleen are a minority religious
group of Coptic Christians in Cairo, Egypt.
 They are set in the Muqqattam village in
Cairo.
 Zabbaleen in Arabic means “Garbage
Collectors” or Garbage People”

3.  They are a community that lives with
recycled products; 85% of what they use
is recycled.
 They are known as the informal garbage
collectors as they make their living with
their waste management system.
 They recycle and dispose most garbage
and whatever can’t be recycled they
feed to the pigs.

4.  Another part of their economic system is
to feed the non-recyclable items to their
pigs in order to fatten them up.
Afterwards, they sell the pigs.
 The Egyptian government gave
government contracts to sanitation
services so the Zabbaleens circumvented
this by collecting the trash before the
sanitation services came in.

5. Marina
 The main character in this story is a 7 year old
girl named Marina.
 She is in school in hopes to become a doctor,
one of the only ones in the village in school.
 Although in a poor family where her mother is
constantly worried about their landlord
evicting them, she is a rather innocent girl
riding flying elephants, befriending mystical
pigeons.

6. Zabbaleen Coptic Christians
 In Egypt, Christians are a minority group where
there is an 85% Muslim population; in this
community, the Christians and Muslims get along.
 Religion is a central part of the community as
Marina’s school is taught in a Christian manner.
 Kids of the Zabbaleen community are forced to
get tattoos of the cross to always remember their
original religion; this originated from Roman
persecution of Christians.

7.  Near the end of the documentary there
was a festival celebrating the Virgin Mary
where they believed the Virgin Mary
appears as a white dove.

8.  Near the end of the movie Marina’s family
almost got kicked out by their angry landlord
who had a rather colorful rant, but weren’t
evicted in the end.
 This documentary was filmed during the
summer of 2005
 In 2009, the Zabbaleens were wiped out of
their village due to the H1N1 virus (aka: Swine
Flu)
 The pigs were taken from the Zabaleens by
the Egyptian government.

9.  Marina and her family still remained in the
village, however their future remains
uncertain.