Dressed all in white with a veil over her blonde hair and a large wooden cross round her neck, Mama Maggie – Maggie Gobran is her real name – arrives in Cairo’s garbage city of Mokattam like an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Children walk with her, holding her hands through the ­narrow streets piled with rubbish.“They call me Mama Maggie. I received this name from the children,” she explains. The first garbage city children she tried to help asked her if they could call her “mama”. “I feel it’s an honour that they give me this name.”Mokattam is one of Cairo’s six garbage cities. The people whose miserable lot it is to live in them are called the Zabaleen, “the garbage people”. There are 70,000 of them in Mok