By  Nehal Lasheen

After spending a whole day with the people of Al-Buhairah village and in the midst of breathtaking views of nature, I had the privilege of witnessing, first hand, a unique environmental project they have been working on.

The idea came to Saeed Al-Gharabawi, an agricultural engineer, after he made a visit to Kenya as a board member of the Environmental Protection and Floral Arrangements Organization in Mombasa. Al-Gharabawi comes from Al-Gharabawi village, where the project was initiated.

"Despite the poor resources I found in Kenya, the landscape was beautiful and inspiring and I am positive that environmental development is the doorway for any form of development," said Al-Gharabawi.

Following his return from Kenya, Al-Gharabawi assembled a meeting with the 2,000 residents of his small village and presented them with his experiences and with his idea for an unprecedented environmental project.

"If we had waited for governmental approval to purchase this or that, we wouldn't have achieved anything. I am a civil society man, if I hadn't the ability to persuade the residents to act, then stepping down would have been my best option," said Al-Gharabawi, who believes that environmental work requires only the will and power to accomplish, with no necessity for governmental contribution.

Communal work began in Al-Gharabawi village with humble resources, for all that was available was soil, water, and shovels. Nonetheless, the residents began cleaning the streets and dirt roads of their village; they also began to mount trash cans made out of plastic, tin, or in some cases even flour sacs on the walls between each two village houses. Then, the planting of trees along the main village streets began.

On a more personal level, home owners also planted a small garden in front of each home. Some villagers planted flowers and decorative plants while others made double use of their small gardens by planting vegetables and herbs. Individual creativity came into place as some villagers began building wooden shelves for potted plants while others began their own hanging gardens using nylon string to support the plants.

In addition, Al-Gharabawi village created a very innovative anti-smoking campaign. They enforced a new law that prevented smoking in the village, but instead of a fine, anyone found smoking would be forced to invite 12 villagers to lunch. This included anyone who was found to have been smoking inside of their home as evidenced by finding a cigarette butt.

Competing for the Title

Work did not stop there. The governor invited Al-Gharabawi to extend his development project to include all villages in Al-Buhairah governorate. Al-Buhairah has an area of 9,121 km squared with the countryside covering 62 percent of its total area. It is strategically placed between Rasheed branch of the Nile Delta to the east, Alexandria and Matrooh to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the north, and Giza governorate to the south.

An accord was then made between the Al-Buhairah governor and the president of the Egyptian Village Construction and Development Authority, a branch of the Local Development Ministry in Cairo. Under this accord, any village that made a serious and continuous effort to be eco-friendly would receive the eco-friendly title. Al-Buhairah villages began to compete with one another for the title, and any village achieving obvious results was awarded the coveted title and then regularly supervised by the executive authorities.

This cooperative effort between the executive authorities and the volunteering residents paved the way for Al-Gharabawi to spread his experience to 12 other Al-Buhairah villages. Miniature environmental projects were set in motion in each village after positions of responsibility were appointed.

Natural Leaders

The heads of families in the village that had a reputation of being competent and of having the potential to motivate others were chosen to be what has come to be known as natural leaders. The term comes from their natural desire to do good.

Wagida Ali, general manager of Al-Buhairah governorate's village development authority elaborates, "Natural leaders have an instinctive desire to do good and to serve their country without waiting for a return and with no political aspirations. They have the ability to volunteer with no underlying motives unlike the elected representative or executive leaderships."

One of the most prominent "natural leaders" is Nawal Al-Shishtawi, who supervises the trash recycling program for Al-Majd village, one of the eco-friendly villages.

"I was responsible for teaching housewives how to recycle trash," explained Al-Shishtawi. "This was done by means of seminars and lectures conducted at the lecture hall in the village. Sometimes, the hall contained as many as 1,000 individuals, which included youth, women, and children."

"We made EGP2,600 (USD485) by selling 26 truckloads of trash, we make EGP100 for each truckload of organic material. We also sold other solid waste materials, more than once, to scrap collectors," said Mustafa, a former tax officer who now works with Koum Al-Hasil's recycling project.

Chemicals are added to the organic material, which is left until it turns into organic manure and then sold. This has all been made possible with help from the village's agricultural counseling service.

Dr. Khairi Al-Kabash, a civil rights law professor and president of the Islamic Al-Hamd development organization in Al-Majd village and the project's main official, described the process of trash recycling. The housewives prepare two trash cans, one for organic wastes and the other for solid wastes. A tractor with two trailers then picks up the two kinds of trash and dumps them separately into a garbage dump.

External Grants and Other Projects

A grant from Denmark has been awarded to Koum Al-Hasil village for the purchase of a tractor, trailer, and trash-recycling equipment as incentives for their sincere efforts on this project.

"As executers, when we see enthusiasm by the residents to do environmental work, we get in touch with grant providers in order to supply some of the material needs such as a tractor to pick up the trash or cleaning equipment for some of the active organizations in the village or a machine for compressing rice haulm to overcome the bad habit of burning rice haulm that takes place in Egypt," said Ali of the village development authority.

Additional solutions for the rice haulm problem other than compressing it and turning it into paper have been found. One of the main projects of Al-Zamarnah village, an eco-friendly village, is the conversion of rice haulm into animal feed in place of hay.

There are also new projects, including the separation of hazardous (such as needles and medicinal cotton) from non-hazardous wastes to prevent transmission of infection to those dealing with trash. I got the chance to witness this myself at Al-Alamiyah, another eco-friendly village.