• Family Life
  Within a few years of their first visits to the rubbish collectors, and certainly before Farahat could be ordained. 1978, he and Su'aad had to come to a decision about where they were going to live: would they continue to visit the area from Shubra, or would they make the rubbish collector’s community their community?
  As a lay-worker, it had been all right for Farahat to visit the rubbish collectors from his place of work and from his home in Shubra. But it was unthinkable for a Coptic priest is not to live in his parish. By being ordained Farahat committed himself and his family to living not only for the rubbish collectors, but also with them.
  So when Farahat and Su'aad came to serve the rubbish collectors, they set aside even their modest middle-class status. They wanted to become like the people they had come to serve, so that they would like and accept them. This caused the couple some serious heart-searching as they moved with their two small children into a violent neighborhood teeming with pigs and rubbish. By now they had a boy and a girl, Albeer and Mary. Just by visiting other mothers Su'aad could bring lice home to her children and there was always the danger of their catching hepatitis, tetanus or meningitis.
• Moving Mountains
  All zeballeen mothers faced the same problems as Su'aad.
  One, called Samia, found God helped her through all the heartbreaking experiences of her life. Married at fourteen, the year before Farahat and Su'aad first visited the area, she was to lose four children through accidents and childhood diseases. Her husband and mother-in-law wanted her to have more children to help collect and sort rubbish, and she was to have five children still living by the time she was thirty-seven. Her eldest son got married and lived with his family in one of the two small rooms in their dwelling. As a hard-pressed mother and grandmother, she has a very difficult life, yet she says, 'Jesus makes everything seem different.' He is her friend and she can count on him when things get tough.
• Ministry
  Once he took on the ordination name of Father Simaan, Farahat aimed to be like his namesake. The Simaan of old got up early to take water to housebound people before he started his day's work, so trying to be like Simaan meant Farahat serving the poor and vulnerable. So the new Father Simaan got alongside the rubbish collectors as any other rubbish collector would.
  Since the rubbish collectors couldn't possibly understand theological terms, Father Simaan didn't use them. Standing up before them, he became just like them - knowing nothing. He spurned any professional priestly technique in his preaching to them, and fifteen minutes beforehand he didn't know what he would say. The countdown continued - ten minutes, five - still he didn't know! All he had were a few disconnected ideas. But once he got started God took over and his whole talk fell into place.
• Stones or Souls?
  Father Simaan didn't have an agenda in his preaching. It wasn't him they came to hear, so he'd wait for Christ to speak. No technique could satisfy the kaleidoscope of needs that faced him, and not all who came were zeballeen. People from a wide range of social backgrounds met to pray. Some wept, some pulled their hair, others shouted aloud. Whatever they did, Father Simaan accepted it. It was the Holy Spirit moving them, not him.
  Preaching wasn't his priority so much as proving Jesus' teaching. Jesus' disciples spent time with him before he sent them out to preach, and by sharing his life he met their need. By this stage, Father Simaan had a team of lay-workers and he wanted them to be able to see Jesus in each other. Only then could they demonstrate his life to others. The most important thing the team could do was to invite Jesus into their lives - and then invite the zeballeen.
• Support Network
  Father Simaan knew what it was like to be a lay-worker, and he certainly didn't believe in workers being loners. Even at the start of his ministry he had always linked up with another brother. He would work and the other would pray, or he would pray and his partner would speak. 'Two are a mirror to each other and take care of each other. That is why Jesus sent his disciples out two by two,' he would say.
  Father Simaan's first prayer-partner never appeared in public. Yet he was always there for him - silent, but sensitive to the leading of the Spirit. They served God together, but this friend took no action unless Father Simaan specifically asked him to. Eventually a third prayer-partner joined them, and then a fourth. And so the inner core of the team formed and grew.
  Although the committed core was small, this reflected Father Simaan's care to lay firm foundations for the work. They began with a small team, because he wanted everyone who took part in evangelism to know Christ personally. The most lowly servant in the church had to know that God was changing him and had given his life a radically new direction. If the church let people serve on the basis of their natural abilities rather than following Christ's leading, then the work might begin with a bang, but sooner or later it would fizzle out. Far better for the work to begin in a small and quiet way, but grow later.
• Festival of St Simaan
  Small and quiet the work may have been, but the Patriarch, Pope Shenouda, took a personal interest in the early efforts of his new priest. Thus Father Simaan went to see Pope Shenouda in his monastery of Anba Reweiss to invite him for the festival of St Simaan the Tanner. Late in November 1978 the community lined his route, waving palm branches and chanting their welcome. People released doves as the Patriarch passed by, after which he celebrated communion in the church. His visit greatly encouraged the people and he repeated it on the same occasion the following November.
  Gradually the festival of St' Simaan grew in importance in the eyes of the people. The reason for celebrating it in November was simple. Back in the tenth century, it was November when Patriarch Abraam had called the Church to fast and pray for three days before the miracle that split the mountain, so the Patriarch decided that the Copts should fast each year in memory of it.
  The Coptic Church observes many fasts during the year. The longest is the Christmas fast. In Patriarch Abraam's time, it lasted forty days. If it had been a matter of choosing any time of year, the Church could have found one when fasts were shorter. Yet it was to this fast that they decided to add three days in memory of the mountain moving. Since they celebrated the new fast 25 to 27 November, this tells us that the original fast began on 25 November and the miracle itself took place on the third day, 27 November AD 979.1
  The twentieth-century Father Simaan believed he was building his mission on the foundation that the tenth century Simaan had laid. His fascination for the mountain and the area around it was so strong he felt like 'a fish out of water' outside it. He felt that he could not be effective if he strayed beyond the borders of that historical place where he belonged. By confining himself to the people of this area, he felt he could make more impact for the gospel; and the more he moved around the community, the more his roles multiplied. God was adding to his gifts, so not only could he preach, but he could also offer a healing ministry. Last but not least, he grew in leadership ability, so that he was also effective as an administrator.
• Dealing with Deprivation
  This gift for leadership was a key asset in facing the challenges presented by the area. A World Bank report of July 1978 counted 15,000 people in Manshiyat Nasir, all living in the most deprived conditions to be found anywhere in Cairo. And despite disease and a high death rate, their number was to double in eighteen years. A programmed for progressive development of the area began in 1980 on the initiative of the Cairo governorate and the World Bank. This involved organizing the rubbish collecting and recycling services into a comprehensive system that could cover the entire city. In less than ten years, the zeballeen were to turn their area into the main centre for recycling rubbish.
  This was good, but it only tackled the material causes of deprivation. There was only -one registered organization that had some link to the Church. Anba Samweel, the Coptic Bishop of Social Services, had started an organization that was run by the zeballeen themselves for their social improvement. And despite the connection with the Church, Anba Samweel managed to legitimate the group's activities by setting it up as a Society of Rubbish Collectors.2
  The date of the Society's registration, 23 January 1974, shows that it was the first to experiment with 'development' work locally. At first it drew its members from the heads of prominent families in Muqattam, as Anba Samweel was keenly aware of their influence on the rubbish collectors. But sadly, his personal contribution ended on 6 October 1981 when he was caught up in a hail of bullets that Muslim extremists were aiming at President Sadat and his entourage. Thus the assassination of President Sadat resulted in the martyrdom of Samweel, a faithful servant of the Coptic Church.
  The society that Anba Samweel founded continued its work under a different name. But neither government agencies, nor foreign funding organizations, even when they worked with local people, could deal with the spiritual roots of economic deprivation and its social consequences. They could not see, as Father Simaan did, that the residents' greatest hope lay in preserving the rich spiritual heritage of the site itself.
  Eventually the day came when an influential person in government wanted to move the people out of their houses and off their land. No doubt he viewed their way of life as backward and their housing as a health hazard, as it mixed people together with animals. But Father Simaan felt passionately that if the zeballeen had to move again, this would pull them apart. It would uproot them from the bedrock of their mountain and break up their community of faith. Both Church and State would be the losers. So Father Simaan decided to appeal to the compassionate heart of the Patriarch and tell him the whole story: 'His holiness answered me in faith, "God who moved the mountain of Muqattam by faith...will remove the thoughts of these people [in authority] from them. '''3
  Events proved the Patriarch right. In his unwavering faith. The authorities abandoned their plan and Father Simaan made good his conviction that Manshiyat Nasir was the right place for the people to be, and the work of the church continued.
  From the 1980s onwards, Father Simaan organized home visiting and follow-up services to the zeballeen district and the surrounding areas, such as Ezbit Bakheet and Doweeqa. He did this through lay-workers consecrated to the task. But it was not until the end of the decade that the Patriarch ordained other priests to share in this ministry.
• Visiting and Follow-up
  Between 1978 and 1985 the lay team was hard at work visiting people and following them up. Their ministry Was 99 per cent practical work and only 1 per cent talk. If they were going to cover the whole district they could go into only one home in each street. Here they might find anything from twenty to fifty people. More would then come in from the street, until a group of up to one hundred would be gathered. Each street would have a separate session with Father Simaan.
  Father Simaan organized the lay-workers in a straightforward way, according to their gifts. No one person was expected to do everything: 'Some sang, some prayed, some followed people up, some served, some ministered in the communion service with me as deacons - it was a shared ministry, everything was shared ... ' Drawing on his own experience as a lay-worker, Father Simaan helped those serving with him to set themselves targets in their personal work. Often this was difficult: it meant sticking at a task through thick and thin.
  Anyone who truly turned to Christ could become a lay worker, but first they had to be disciple by others who had been tried and tested. They needed to share the lives of these workers so that they could worship and grow, until they reached the point when they could lead lives of ministry. The problem was getting young disciples to spend long enough with the lay-workers to grow effectively.
  One non-zeballeen lay-worker who joined the team describes how Father Simaan asked him to concentrate on three older men in the church. They had come back to their faith, but were 'still wobbling'. He tried to make friends with these three and spent time reading the Bible with one of them, but the other two were always 'too busy'. It was easier to win their friendship than their commitment. They were ready enough to chat affably with their friend, but not to spend time reading the Bible or praying with him. Father Simaan helped his lay-worker to tackle the problem, in a way that convinced him that 'if you're going to be effective, you've got to focus on a few people, you've got to stay in one place, you've got to concentrate on one thing'. It was this understanding that encouraged a worker to stick to the task, however long it took.
  Part of the problem with persuading zeballeen to keep up their Christian commitment was the amount of time they spent working just to stay alive. It took great discipline for them to go to a discipleship meeting after a tiring day. Yet if they didn't keep going to the meetings, then illiteracy or a very limited reading ability would stop them from feeding themselves spiritually from the Bible. Consequently, many 'fell away'.
  However, Father Simaan didn't let his lay-workers dwell on such setbacks. Instead he made the most of the encouragements that came their way. If someone did turn to the Lord, Father Simaan would organize a big celebration. This was called a 'repentance party'. Since the government system of identity cards in Egypt fixes your religion from birth, you don't say someone has 'become a Christian'. Instead you say they have 'come back to Our Lord' or 'repented'. When someone repented Father Simaan would always have a brace of pigs killed and throw a party. The whole church could come to a sizzling barbecue on the rooftop of the convert's house. They would put chairs up on the roof and have a resounding time of praise and worship. People could get carried away and the flood of praise would go on well into the night.
  If Father Simaan's penchant for roast pork was a predictable source of refreshment for his lay-workers, his quest for new ideas always kept them guessing as to what was coming next. New projects came off the drawing-board thick and fast. Soon there were workshops for carpentry and electrical skills, and later two bookshops. The Muqattam area offered much scope for experimentation. From time to time a breeze-block-type structure would appear, only to be torn down again quite quickly to make way for a better building. Father Simaan needed a good deal of imagination and faith to keep trying until his building projects really fitted the needs of mission in Muqattam.
• Ministry on the Mountain
  Much effort went into drawing out the potential of the mountain as a base for ministry. On a flat, rocky shelf halfway up the mountain the team planned to add a retreat centre for training the lay-workers. They called it the deir (monastery), although there were no monks. It included buildings for auxiliary ministries as well as churches.
  The first site on the mountain to be used without interruption as a place of worship was a converted cave. Worshippers sat in a bank reaching up to the cave's mouth. When it opened in 1986 it was small and its facilities very basic. Yet the site had the potential to be greatly enlarged. They called it 'the cavern'. Plunging into the cavern to do his share of the building work was for Father Simaan a welcome opportunity of being incognito for a while. Once he'd been at it for a short time the black dust of the mountain covered him so thickly that it was extremely hard to recognize him. Since he wore a long black galibeyya and black cap, you often couldn't make out his face from his clothes!
  Yet even those who did recognize him didn't necessarily recognize the value of what he was doing. Sincere believers would come up to him and say, 'Are you serving the stones?' Some people close to him rebuked him for not spending more time in personal work. 'Do stones matter more than souls?' was their question. Father Simaan gave no glib answers. He hardly understood better than they did why God wanted them to do all this construction work. All he knew was that there was a vision driving him on that God was going to fulfill. What the outcome would be, he didn't know. What mattered was that God was leading him.
  It was hard to fathom the need for so much construction work partly because it was so difficult to persuade people to come and use the existing church facilities. At that time the main public meeting was on Tuesdays. Lay-worker: would meet for pray~ and then go round the streets in pairs, inviting people to come. Most people they met said 'Oh yes, I'm coming, I'm coming' - and then didn't. Egyptian culture does not encourage directly refusing a request and so words are not necessarily an indication of intention. It was like the parable of the son who says to his father, 'Yes, I'm going to the vineyard', but doesn't go (Matthew 21.30).
• The Committed Core
  Time spent inviting people to meetings could be better used talking with people one-to-one or doing group training sessions. Much seed fell on thorns or thistles, or shallow ground that produced no lasting fruit. Yet a committed core began to emerge, of people who really caught the vision for the gospel and for going forward in Christian service. Young men worked at their jobs during the day and engaged in ministry of one kind or another in the evenings. Teenage girls got involved in teaching, and some kept their vision for prayer and witness after getting married and having children...
  Some examples will show what a commitment this demanded.
  Suma was from a poor family that lived at ground level with their pigs and their rubbish. The family didn't get on with one another well. Unlike other families who tried to better themselves, they never built a second storey on to their house to lift themselves above the filth. The only way Suma could raise her expectations was to attend the church school as a teenager. There was a church meeting on Thursdays that Suma could go to, but by the time she was sixteen she was engaged to a man she hardly knew. When they got married a year later, it was clear that her husband was not a believer.
  But the couple did have one advantage, not often found in the affluent West. Suma and her husband both believed that since they were married, they should stick together and learn to love each other. When problems arose, they didn't give up. Suma knew a teacher at the church school from a more privileged family whose husband encouraged her to work. Suma and her husband went to this Christian couple for counseling - and Suma's husband came to faith. Eventually Suma became a self-confident teacher at the church school where she had studied as a teenager.
  The teenage girls had their church meeting on Thursdays. The government employees who had to work on Sundays could go to a communion service on Friday mornings. This was held in the Church of St Simaan below the mountain, the one built .after the miraculous healing of Adham's head. One evening in the week the committed core of lay-workers met - and wept over their sins and unworthiness to pray. Some of them used to go away by themselves into a corner of the room and cry out aloud and at length, while other people were praying. This was confusing for a visitor, but no one doubted they were praying in earnest.
• Rediscoveries
  For six long years they prayed that God would show them how to discover the entrance to a new meeting place. Then in 1986 a workman who was lifting a rock dropped it and it crashed down to the level below. When the dust cleared they could see that the impact had opened up a previously invisible underground cavity. When their eyes had finally adjusted to the gloom, the workers found beneath their-feet 'a starkly beautiful cave with natural rock pillars'.4
  The cave's presence was a constant reminder that God could have more surprises in store for them yet. By 1990, they had started work on fashioning a church out of the cave. To their surprise, the natural shape of the cave fitted perfectly the outline of a traditional Coptic church. It divided naturally into three sections: for enquirers, the baptized and the communicants. All they had to do was hang a curtain in front of the space that would typically serve as a sanctuary.
  The place may have been a church or at least a meeting place long ago, before falling into disuse and getting filled with rubble. Traces found among the rubbish suggested that there had been a rail for tying horses. Organic remains suggested food and accessories used in Napoleon's army. He had invaded Egypt in 1798, and for three years confronted the country with the full range of Western technology. The West was also given an insight into Egypt by the work of eminent professors that Napoleon took with him on his campaign. Eventually Nelson sunk the French fleet and the British helped the Ottoman Turks to expel Napoleon's army by September 1801.5
  Whatever it had been used for before, the cave was reopened in 1991 as a church. It was named after Anba Boula, a hermit monk who followed the pattern of St Anthony.
  Long ago, in response to falling standards of Christian life in the cities, Egyptian Christians pioneered a counterculture by staying single and living a simple lifestyle. At first they tried this in local churches, but increasingly they followed the example of St Anthony, who in 270 sold his estates and went to live in the desert.
  Egypt lends itself to such withdrawal because 97 per cent of the land is desert. Towns were limited mainly to the narrow strip of the Nile valley in the south, or to the fertile region of the Nile river delta in the north. In the northern desert St Anthony lived as a hermit and his disciples followed a solitary way of life; in the southern desert St Pachomius set a pattern of large communities which had made a radical break from society. In between the two regions and the two models, were the monks of Nitria who lived in small groups near a spiritual father and met for worship at weekends.6
  Such lifestyles attracted a lot of interest in the West. Monks with Egyptian names reached Ireland and stayed there till their deaths. They may have been the inspiration for St Patrick, who set the pattern of small communities as bases from which Celtic monks could reach Britain with the gospel.
  Although it has no monks, Coptic visitors call the Muqattam Mountain retreat centre site 'the monastery'. So for them the cave church named after Anba Boula conjured up images of the ascetic spiritual lifestyle of the desert. There was space in the church for 400 worshippers. When they entered it one morning they were shocked to find all the cave walls blackened. It seems there had been a fire the night before, yet the smoke had left untouched the altar curtains and an icon of Christ.7 the believers wondered why God would allow such damage to the church, but later came to see the incident as providential.
  Egypt is still, nominally at least, following certain aspects of nineteenth-century Ottoman Turkish law that aimed to restrict church building, repairs and activities. It is very hard to get permission to build a new church and there are far fewer church buildings in Egypt than the Copts need. In this instance, a delegation came to find out what the Copts were doing 'building' a church on government land. If they received no satisfactory explanation, they could close it down immediately. But the blackened nature of the interior persuaded the delegation that the church wasn't new. A typical feature of ancient Coptic buildings is a blackened ceiling and walls darkened with smoke from candles used by worshippers down the ages. Thus the Department of Antiquities decided that the church had existed for centuries and they gave it protected status.
  Three years after the discovery of Anba Boula in 1986 came another remarkable confirmation that God was watching over the efforts on the mountain. In 1989 workers on the cliff-face dislodged a large boulder and sent it crashing down into a courtyard some 30 meters below. Many people lived in the buildings around it, and plenty of pigs in it, yet no one was hurt - neither human nor animal. 8
• NOTES:
1. Anon., the Biography of St Samaan, pp. 71-2.
2. See A'bd Al-Fatah, N., and Rashwaan, D. (eds), 'The Rubbish Collectors' Community', pp. 265-9.
3. See Ibrahim, Qomos S., The Pope Loves Them, pp. 21-2.
4. Jenkitis, S., 'Faith to Move Mountains', p. 13.
5. For a full account of the French campaign, see Moorehead, A., The Blue Nile, Part 2.
6. See Ward, B., The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers, p. ix.
7. See note 4.
8. See note 4.

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