Since we moved into the apartment, the country has cycled through three constitutions, three Presidents, four Prime Ministers, and more than seven hundred members of parliament.

But there hasn’t been a single day when the trash wasn’t cleared outside my kitchen door.

In a sprawling, chaotic city of more than seventeen million, At first, I never saw Sayyid working, because he cleared my fire escape before dawn.I didn’t really understand what he meant, but het explained me that in that way we could share a hotelroom as we were going to Luxor. We planned to stay in Holland for several years to earn some money and then move to Egypt. After he had lived here for more than six months, he thought that renting a house, was a waste of money and he suggested we should buy a house.Later on we could get married in the official way, I agreed. All this with the money I had from an inheritance and a small loan.It’s in the kitchen, and when we first moved to the apartment, at the beginning of 2012, the landlady told me to deposit my trash on the fire escape outside the door at any time.There was no pickup schedule, and no preferred container; I could use bags or boxes, or I could simply toss loose garbage outside. He wasn’t a government employee, and he had no contract or formal job.In Cairo, my family lives on the ground floor of an old building, in a sprawling, high-ceilinged apartment with three doors to the outside.One door opens onto the building’s lobby, another leads to a small garden, and the third is solely for the use of the , or garbageman, who is named Sayyid Ahmed.