Beggars

It’s the little girls that get me. They always have. Maybe it’s some sort of evolutionary mechanism in me that wants to protect the species, or the poetry in me that wants to protect the beautiful and delicate things of the world. Maybe it’s the psychology in the way a little girl symbolizes innocence and I’m reaching for something I’ve lost, or maybe it’s just a longing for an old-fashioned honour I wish the world hadn’t given up on: women and children first – and little girls are both. Anyway, a little girl can usually win my heart, easy as blinking.

The one that came up to us in the square the other afternoon had me under her thumb before she even said hello. She had a green dress and a headscarf that kept slipping off her head, revealing midnight hair that belonged to an Arabian princess. Her feet were bare and dirty and she had the kind of smile Hollywood agents culls thousands of headshots for. She was, as my friend Sarah said, ‘precious’ – the Shirley Temple of little girl beggars. She was trying to sell us her bunch of dirty, fading roses. For shoes, she indicated demurely, smiling at us and shuffling her feet in the dust. Across the square was an old man in uniform, with a orange hennaed beard and a red stick to beat children that bug the tourists. She kept her eyes on us but you could tell she knew exactly where this old bugger was, and you can bet those little feet could run as fast as a deer, shoes or not.

We were eating, and I asked if she was hungry. I got an ambiguous answer and gave her my sandwich anyway, just in case. She took it and wandered off to the low wall at the edge of the square, only to come back a moment later, munching on the bread and shamelessly and adorably asking for money again. I eventually broke down and gave her some, but she was not done until she’d taken ten rupees from each of us. She thanked us prettily and came back later to give Sarah the gift of a tiny rose wrapped in plastic cellophane. Later, after every beggar and shoeshiner and charalatan in the square radared in on us with cartoon dollar signs in their eyes, we got up and moved on. Stepping over the wall at the edge of the square I noticed most of my sandwich on the ground, discarded. So she probably wasn’t hungry. I bet the next time I see her, she still won’t have shoes, either. Who would give money to a well-fed, well-shoed, pretty little girl? Well, me, I guess.

I know people around here – expats, foreigners – who would roll their eyes at me and throw up their hands in disgust, but I’ve been doing this lately. I’ve been giving people money. Beggars. They come up to the cars at stoplights. Men with legs missing, swinging along on wooden crutches, with arms missing, tapping the stump of an elbow on the windows. Women with underfed babies, faces smeared with dirt and some kind of caking ointment, cupping their hands palm up to heaven like they’re pointing to the last place they saw God before they lost Him. They put on a show of tears – or maybe the tears are real – and look at you through the glass like you’re their last hope. And children. Cheeky boys selling wilting roses with the million dollar smiles of game show hosts, sad boys pouting and cupping their hands to their mouths, little girls in torn dresses tilting their heads to one side like puppies watching you eat.

I know what they say. I know you’re not supposed to just give money to people. There are a lot of reasons, apparently. Here’s a sample:

1. It makes foreigners a target for more begging.
2. It makes people dependent and they never learn to work for themselves. They’re probably fine and anyway, if you give them money they will never become successful self-made people like the rest of us.
3. There are reputable agencies who specialize in giving. You should give to them instead, because they’ll do it much better than you. They’ve devised such a clever way of giving handouts with so many empowering conditions that people can’t help but become successful by it.

I guess you can tell by my increasingly sarcastic tone that I don’t think much of any of these, but the first one really makes me angry. Aside from the fact that it’s total rubbish – foreigners are targets for begging by default and always will be, whether they give or not, because they’re always flashing the expensive things they got at the mall and positively smell of money – this kind of statement stinks of snobbish justification for avoiding anything inconvenient to ourselves. There’s a word for that. Selfishness. And as for it being better to give through these enlightened agencies, I have a front row seat to that circus, and while there might be something in it, there’s not nearly as much as there is in a life sacrificed to the will of God, which leans sharply towards the good of all people, and especially the poor.

The second one about making people more dependent has more weight than the others and I’ll tackle that in a minute. But first, I should just throw out one more, which comes out of my own tradition of western Christianity:

4. Jesus and his disciples never gave money. Instead they healed people or did other things that showed they could see the deeper problem behind the begging, and they reached in and solved that instead… ‘Silver and gold have I none, but what I have I give to you … be healed!’

The simplest thing to say to that is ‘Exactly.’ But it doesn’t justify not giving money. If anything, it only justifies living a life of such openness and devotion to God that we have the Wisdom to notice and offer solutions to deeper problems, and the faith to see them through. It doesn’t justify us stepping over the downtown drunk panning for change on the sidewalk while we make our way to the mall to buy more things we don’t need, saying smugly to ourselves that Jesus never gave money so why should we? Well, he didn’t go to the mall either, except once. And he was so angry he trashed the place.

So back to the dependency cycle. They ask, you give, they keep asking, you keep giving and there you are like that, ‘round and ‘round. They never feel the need to leave their desperate situation and you keep hoping they will because you had the grace to give them a chance. Finally, perhaps, you give up on them in complete frustration and they go find another bleeding heart donor. So why be part of this? Why not do something that actually helps, or even nothing at all, which is cynical but may be better than buying into such a dead-end scheme? Well, first of all because we’re talking about people actually changing, and whatever it is that prompts that, I’ve never seen anything to suggest that fancy programs do it better than handing out cash. In fact, as P. J. O’Rourke once said, no amount of money has ever really helped the poor in America, whether it was simply given to them straight or spent on programs and housing and schemes to give them a leg up. The poor are still with us, just as many if not more than before.

It’s tough to help people change. Apparently a reporter asked Andy Warhol if the experience of getting shot changed him, and he replied: ‘Have you ever seen anyone really change?’ But I do think people change, and I think they do it when they are inspired to change by something – or someone. Or Someone. I suspect when people change it has more to do with who gives out the money or implements the programs than it does with the money or the programs themselves. Which gets me back to us living lives of sacrifice and devotion to the God of the poor, and therefore lives open to the poor themselves. This may take us away from giving money, but most likely because, like Jesus, we will have none to give, instead of because we’d rather spend it on ourselves.

I don’t think the Protestant work ethic is Christianity, because I don’t think our money is really our own. The kings of ancient Israel who gave any thought to God at all kept saying that all they had came from the hand of God, and the prophets of ancient Israel mostly had no money at all, because they didn’t need it. God brought them bread in the beaks of ravens, or fed them from the hands of poor widows who had nothing either. I think most of us are like kings, but usually like the kings who didn’t give God a thought. We think we got all that money ourselves, that we’ve earned the right to do what we want with it. A precious few of us are like the prophets, and around these you notice that people, even the beggars, often change. People with lots of money aren’t inspiring; they’re usually depressed. It’s the people with this mystifying habit of ignoring money and chasing after an invisible God that often bring about the good in the world. What I think is that we need to stop worrying so much about the right way to change the beggars into successful middle-class folk like us and start thinking about how change ourselves from successful middle-class folks into the beggars we really are. Our money comes from the hand of Someone, too. We’ve just self-righteously fooled ourselves into thinking we made it on our own.

I don’t know if the money I hand out of car windows really helps those sad little boys, those disarmed men, those crying mothers. I don’t know if it really helped the cutest of flower girls. I have to say I doubt it, but I don’t really know. But I don’t really give it for them. As Bono said in his recent rock-and-roll speech at a White House breakfast, God lives with the poor, and whatever you do for them you do for him. I imagine the cheeky kid hanging on my car door at stoplights is God. Would I give God a dollar if he asked? Would I give him two? I hope so. You don’t even have to get as far as God – imagine the kid is yours, or your sister’s. Would you give him a dollar?

In my own life I throw away dollars as easy as breathing. I spend them on drinks I don’t need, on clothes I want, on new songs for my iPod. I spend them on parking tickets because I’m too impatient to find change for the metre. I spend them on eating out and stupid pirated DVDs from foreign countries that don’t even work when I get them home. I spend hundreds and hundreds on all sorts of things, none of which really get me anything worthwhile, nothing I can take with me when I’ve gone back to dust. And I’m quibbling over a dollar or two that all the best religious sources agree is probably a dollar or two for God? It’s my own life that needs changing.

So the second reason I give out money is simply to be free of it. It owns me, obviously, if I can’t give it away easily, so I give it out to practice not being owned by it. I give it out for the sake of my own soul. Maybe the eye-rollers are right and this is not the best way to do it, but I suspect that if God has such a close eye on the poor he can take something as insignificant as a dollar given to one of his little ones at a street corner or a stoplight and make something of it. In the meantime, I’m unhooking its dirty little claws from my heart and getting a little closer to real life, something I can take with me.