Election fever has even come to Cairo's Garbage City, the sprawling neighborhood built on — and living from — the waste of the Egyptian capital.

The tens of thousands of impoverished residents of the district are almost all Christians. For generations, they have collected the garbage from the city of nearly 20 million; they sort it then recycle and sell what they can. Their homes are built in and around piles of the refuse, where their livestock graze.

Like other Egyptians, they are now savoring the prospect of having their voice heard as the country begins voting on Wednesday for a new president, the first since the ouster last year of longtime leader Hosni Mubarak.

The overwhelming concern for many of them is to stop any Islamist candidate from winning. Many of Egypt's Christian minority — about 20 percent of the population of 85 million — are worried that if the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood candidate wins and moved to implement Islamic law, they will suffer greater discrimination.