• DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIRACLES?
  Miracles strike us ill two contradictory ways. We are attracted by anything that lifts us out of our everyday ruts, and gives us a glimpse of heaven. Yet we feel extremely skeptical about anything that seems to make nonsense of our rational and scientific way of viewing the universe. When it comes to the Gospels, we are attracted to Jesus as a human being, but often find it hard to explain and accept his miracles.
  This book concerns the lives of a group of rubbish collectors living near Cairo. Their story brings the miracles of the Gospels abruptly into the present. Yet they trace the origins of their thriving and colorful church back to the days when St Mark, the evangelist and Gospel writer, came to Egypt. But the coming of the Muslims to Egypt in the seventh century began the process by which the Christians of Egypt found themselves a minority. Even today they are denied opportunities for promotion and advancement that would help the disadvantaged among them to escape from the poverty trap.
  As we approach the millennium, there are still many people in the world living in appalling conditions. What hope would you have if your house were filled with other people's stinking rubbish, if deprivation and disease stalked the land, and pigs lived in your backyard?
  People in conditions like these are sometimes more open to the power of God than we in the affluent West are. The beauty of our green landscapes, best-kept villages and multipurpose shopping malls blinds us to the reality of life for many throughout the world. Admittedly we have emotional problems, and medical ones too, but the raw struggle for survival in a polluted and impoverished place is completely foreign to our perceptions.
  When you cannot afford a doctor, when you can't find food, where will you turn? Do you commit physical and spiritual suicide by resorting to drink, drugs and crime - or do you put your faith in God? This book tells the very remarkable story of how faith can genuinely move mountains, and what God can achieve through those who truly put their trust in him.
• Profile of a rubbish collector
  It was Easter Day and I was following in the wake of a lay-worker who worked among the zeballeen, or rubbish collectors, of Cairo. He was marching through the flies and filth, visiting as many people as he could in the community. The people live out on the edge of the city, under the shadow of the Muqattam Hills. Every day the men bring back the refuse of the metropolis in trucks and donkey carts to their streets and homes. The women then sift through it and salvage anything useful. They give the food scraps to the animals, so dogs and donkeys (sometimes a dead dog or a disabled donkey), goats and pigs mill around in the mud-and-manure alleyways. It was in this scene of squalor that my friend proclaimed to all he met, 'Yesua Qam!' ('Christ has risen!').
  What did it mean to them? That's just what he asked one young pig-keeper who had turned to Christ only a month before. The man had married at the age of sixteen and lived with his wife in a small room. He had no papers as his birth certificate had been burnt up in a fire. This meant he also had no identity card. In Egypt everyone carries an ID card: it states not only your name and parentage, but also your religion. Rather in the way that people in Britain used to put down on their hospital forms 'C of E' (even if they were not active Anglicans at all), so in Egypt nearly all non-Muslims put 'Christian' on their card.
  Legally everyone in Egypt has to have a religion. The vast majority of the 10 per cent of Egyptians who are 'Christian' rather than Muslil1l identify themselves with the ancient Coptic Orthodox Church, but this doesn't mean that they are necessarily keen Orthodox Christians, or know anything about Christ. Some indeed are very zealous, but the average local Coptic church is doing extremely well if it can attract 10 per cent of the Copts in the district to attend on a regular basis. In many villages there are no churches at all, and in many cities there are not enough, since it is difficult - some would say impossible - to get permission to build a new church. There are many parts of Egypt where there is no church available to teach the Copts, and many may know more about how Muslims pray than how they should worship as Christians.
  The rubbish collectors' community we are concerned with here had up until 1974 been one such place: the people knew nothing about Christ, and if they wanted to pray they might bring newspapers and spread them out on the ground in imitation of Muslim prayer mats. Our young pig-keeper had been like this - a Copt in name only, growing up among people who until 1974 had had no one to teach them the Coptic Orthodox faith. As he had no papers, he had no legal rights - but he did get the chance to hear the gospel. Although he had no ID card, most of the rubbish collectors were presumed to be originally from Christian families. This was important, because in Egypt there are tight restrictions on any evangelistic activities of the Church, especially if it is suspected that Muslims might get to hear the gospel. But in the pig-keeper's case, the Church felt free to visit him - and all the more so because he was a pig-keeper.
  When it comes to hearing the gospel, what is the advantage of looking after pigs? Simply this. In any other part of Cairo, if a Copt were to play a Christian cassette tape so that it could be heard in the street, he would get a visit from Muslim fundamentalists. Rubbish collectors, however, are generally spared their attentions, and this was why my friend could march through the streets shouting 'Jesus is risen!' without molestation. Why is this? It is partly due to the fact that the rubbish collectors keep pigs. Pigs in Islam are considered to be unclean, and those who look after them are popularly viewed as sub-human. So to avoid defiling themselves, keen Muslims would not contemplate going into a rubbish collector's shack - especially if he was also a pig-keeper.
  This particular young man kept his pigs downstairs on the ground floor, so no Muslim would dream of entering his house. Previously he had lived in a shack, but by carefully selling off a couple of pigs per year, he had managed to build a shell of a house out of breeze blocks. There was no plaster and no glass in the windows, so dust and ash from burnt rubbish could freely blow in.
  To make our visit more comfortable the pig-keeper put some pieces of cardboard across the gaping windows to stop the worst of the dirt from blowing in. We sat at a table - the one prominent piece of furniture in that upstairs room. There were a few chairs, but everything else (including kitchen utensils) had to be left on the floor. So far they had three children to look after and, 'God willing', there would certainly be more - rubbish collectors like to have lots of children so that there are more boys to collect the rubbish, and more girls to sort it. Several would die in childhood.
  In these circumstances the young man had had little self-respect and had taken to drink and drugs, but now he had met with Christ and felt his love and purifying power. The drink and drugs had gone.
  Those things were gone, but what was in their place? My friend pressed him on this point, knowing that while it was not so hard for people to be attracted to Christ, it was much harder for them to stick at the Christian life. For one thing, people don't like rubbish collectors to have any time off, and for another, he couldn't read, so it was hard to feed himself spiritually.
  So to answer my friend's question the pig-keeper had to think hard and struggled to find words. He knew he should love his wife, his children, his sister...
  'And who else?' prodded my friend.
  'Everyone?' asked the pig-keeper.
  The fact that he even asked the question was a sign of the work of the Holy Spirit within him. This area of Cairo had been notorious for fighting, gambling, knifing and shooting incidents. It was not a light thing for someone born and brought up in these circumstances to even consider a different way of life. There were still many barriers and difficulties to overcome - not the least of which was trying to understand the Christian life when the words of the Arabic Bible were almost foreign to him.
  To try to reinforce .the pig-keeper's determination to go on with Christ, my friend read to him the passage in John 15:1-11 when Jesus talks about the vine and the vinedresser. But reading anything was for the rubbish collector an alien activity. My friend found himself in a position rather like that of a child from school today, trying to explain computer language to a parent who had never so much as touched a keyboard. The communication gap was as wide as that.
  After every sentence my friend had to ask the pig-keeper if he understood. If he didn't, he would find another word and carry on. The aim was that by the end of the conversation the pig-keeper would have a better idea about how to bear fruit in Christ.
  For my lay-worker friend, to have a pig-keeper ask how to live the Christian life was the greatest miracle that he could wish for. Knowing the difficulties, knowing the barriers that had to be overcome - of deprivation, disease, poverty, ignorance and temptation - this was a far greater miracle than the more spectacular physical healings and acts of God that also took place under the rubbish collectors' mountain. 'Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, "Your sins are forgiven," or to say, "Get up, take your mat and walk"?' (Mark 2.9 NIV}.
  In coming to read about the community that lives under the Muqattam Mountain, you are coming to a mountain of faith - a place that symbolizes what God can do as he acts in power to lift up the lowest of the low, to save the weak to confound the strong.
• Cairo Land Marks

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