The Woman Who Left Everything
Maggie Gobran was a marketing professor at the American University in Cairo. She drove a nice car, lived in an upscale neighbourhood, and wore designer clothes. In 1989, she visited Mokattam — known as "Garbage City" — a settlement built into the cliffs at the edge of Cairo where the Zabbaleen community collected and sorted the city's waste by hand. Tens of thousands of people, including children, lived among mountains of refuse.
That visit broke something open in Maggie. She resigned her university position, gave away her possessions, and moved her life's work to the garbage villages. She founded Stephen's Children, an organisation dedicated to the Zabbaleen community's most vulnerable members.
What She Built
Mama Maggie, as the children came to call her, established schools, medical clinics, and vocational training centres in the garbage settlements. Her approach was distinctly personal. She visited families, sat with children on their own doorsteps, and insisted that every child be called by name. In a community where children routinely grew up believing they were worth less than the rubbish they sorted, being seen and named was itself a radical act of justice.
By 2024, Stephen's Children served over 30,000 children and families across multiple sites in Cairo. The programme had produced university graduates, teachers, nurses, and entrepreneurs — all from a community that mainstream Egyptian society had written off entirely.
The Philosophy
Mama Maggie's work was not charity in the conventional sense. She did not just provide services. She dismantled the idea that poverty determines value. She regularly told her team: "If you cannot see the face of God in the face of the person sitting across from you, you will never see God at all." Her justice was intimate and relentless.
She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize multiple times and has been called the "Mother Teresa of Cairo." She has never sought the comparison. She simply kept showing up, year after year, in the places no one else wanted to go.
What This Means for You
Justice does not always mean fighting against something. Sometimes it means fighting for someone — consistently, personally, and without needing the spotlight. Mama Maggie's story challenges the idea that impact requires scale. It starts with one child, one name, one doorstep visit. If that is all you can manage today, it is enough.