School of hard and smelly knocks: Two young students stand in front of their trash-filled home after coming back from school in al–Zabaleen, a poor area of Cairo, on Oct. 20. Belgium-born nun Sister Emmanuelle spent some 20 years here, helping establish schools and health clinics for poor trash scavengers known as zabaleen, a term derived from the Arabic word for “garbage.” At a school in Manshiet Nasser, a community populated by many zabaleen, children learn not only their ABCs (or Alif Ba, as an Egyptian would say), but the basics of trash collection and recycling, including how to track plastic bottles by computer.