Mama Maggie of Cairo: ‘Every needy child is your child’

from catholicherald.co.uk

The attack on the church in Alexandria just a few minutes into 2011 and the protests currently shaking Egypt have woken the world up to the dangers facing the country’s Christian minority. But on top of the ever-present danger of terrorism and political instability in the majority Muslim nation poverty is still the number one enemy.

Although many of Egypt’s more than 10 million Christians are middle-class and highly educated, roughly half live in dire poverty. Many are in Cairo, a mega-city of 20 million people which mirrors the growing pains of the Industrial Revolution in Europe – except that the extremes of poverty are more intense, and there are more people struggling to earn a living.

The poor occupy the teeming slums, the poor occupy the graveyards and the ancient ruins, and they even occupy the city’s rubbish dumps. The Zabbaleen, or “garbage people”, are Coptic Christians who have lived in the dumps for a century now and work as informal rubbish collectors in the city. The Zabbaleen are also called Zarraba, which translates as “pig-pen operators”, as they keep pigs that feed on organic waste. They number between 60,000 and 70,000 and mainly live in Moqattam Village, nicknamed “Garbage City”, at the foot of a mountain outside Cairo, next to a Muslim squatter settlement.

This is a different world to the one Maggie Gobran was born into, as part of Egypt’s cosmopolitan, western-facing upper middle class, which until Nasser’s disastrous nationalist reforms included large numbers of Greeks, Italians, Jews and Armenians in one of the culturally richest countries on earth. The mother of two was working at the prestigious American University in Cairo when her father’s sister died.

“She dedicated her life to the poor,” she recalls as she sits dressed in a white shawl during a brief visit to London. “When she passed away afterwards I realised I must do something for them. I was around 35 when I first visited but it took some time before I had the call from God.”

That Christmas she visited a rubbish dump to hand out gifts to the poor, and at one of the mounds saw something moving. Beginning to dig, she found a small child buried in rubbish. Then she found another.

“The first time I couldn’t believe human beings could live like this,” she says, “that people are surrounded by garbage. You could not imagine a child could survive like this.

“There are some areas in Egypt, like Sharm el-Sheikh, that are very good for tourists and I recommend it. But in Cairo there are half a million living like that. When you find the poorest children in the slum areas there is not enough access for many basic needs. They’re the poorest of the poor. They don’t have someone to care for them.”

But one incident really shocked her. “I found a widow, almost my age, and her children were the age of my children and she couldn’t find a pair of shoes. When I took this girl to get shoes she said: ‘I wanted a bigger size.’ ”

She asked the girl why. “For my mother, she doesn’t have them,” the girl replied.

“And I thought: what a spirit of sacrifice, that she thought of her mother rather than herself. When I got home I thought I could have been in her place. She said when her husband died four years ago no one came to us.

“I didn’t choose my family to be brought up in a well-off family. All of a sudden it was a great shock.”

Resolving to do something about it, this gentle but formidable Coptic Orthodox Christian set up Stephen’s Children, named after the first martyr. In a quarter of a century it has helped thousands of children, and has over 1,200 members helping in the region of 24,000 families, operating 60 medical clinics and education centres, and ministering to over 21,000 children. It also runs a kindergarten which cares for between 250 and 400 children, aged two to six years, at any one time. Here, the children get food, health checks, clothes and a Christian education – something many lack.

One veteran Christian activist has described Maggie Gobran as “one of the most amazing Christian ministries I have ever come across”.

Recently the organisation helped a young Christian boy, Malak, whose family was surviving on one meal a day, and whose mother was too malnourished to feed her starving baby. Malik was praying to God to save the life of his baby brother, who was getting weaker with every hour, when a worker from Stephen’s Children found out about it. They arranged for the family to be given a goat; the mother and baby survived.
Mama Maggie, as she is known in Cairo, became a regular figure in the slums.

“I didn’t know how to deal with people because they had their own culture,” she says, explaining that her upper middle class accent and mannerisms made her stand out. “But I couldn’t accept that I couldn’t do it, because when I was reading my Bible it became clear God was calling me. I couldn’t do anything else.”

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