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A Child's Hand
Entry 36 of 133 | show all | print this entry |
It started with a child's hand.
Begging is a part of travel. It doesn't matter how much money you make at home, if you travel in the developing world you are rich, and you will always be perceived as rich. It also means you will always be a magnet for beggars. How a person deals with this is deeply personal, and I'm not sure there is only one correct way.
Beggars and begging comes in all shapes and sizes. Old people, often with cataracts blurring their eyes, will look up from the ground, hand outreached with a pleasing look. Sometimes people with horrible disfigurements, whether by nature or catastrophe, will smile at you and with a nod of their head, lead your eyes towards their scars and then extend a cup. Sometimes it is a person, usually male, young, and often quite fit looking, who will approach asking for money for bus fare back to his home country, or some other reason. Probably the hardest are the children. Often these children are as beautiful as they are miserable looking. Dressed in tattered, dirty clothes they come up along side of you, big eyes pleading, tiny hands reaching out, and using whatever little English they have to ask you for a pen, a gift, or money. "100 shillings so I can eat." "No mother, no father. Please money." Sometimes it's a steady patter in their native language that you can't understand, but you know what they are asking. The worse are the babies, left alone in the middle of the sidewalk, unable yet to speak, but already knowing how to extend their open palms towards you.
For Michelle, it started with a child's hand.
We were walking along a street in Kampala when a group of beggar children saw us, and immediately approaches. Walking along side us, hands outstretched, saying "Sa. Sa. Sa.", a mispronunciation of "sir." I walked on, as always uncomfortable in the situation, but generally following a rule of not giving money to child beggars. I have a few reasons why not, but that's not the point right now.
As my stride took me beyond the children's reach I realized Michelle was not with me, I stopped and looked behind. Twenty feet back, and surrounded by children, Michelle stood smiling but looking a little anxious. Little hands were reaching up, holding her hands, and stroking her arms. She looked at them, murmuring words of kindness and regret while the children now seemed much more interested in the skin and attention of this blond muzungu woman than any money they might receive. Finally, with words of condolences and goodbye, she pulled away and joined me.
As we began to walk she told me about one child's hand and arm. "It was so thin. You could feel the bone, but the skin wasn't tight like it should be. It was loose feeling. It didn't feel right." While we walked on- spending an afternoon drinking coffee, buying handicrafts, and surfing the internet, the feel of that small hand stayed.
We ended up having dinner at Fang-Fangs, a Chinese restaurant recommended by our guide book. It was a Sunday evening, and the place was full of people dressed in their Sunday best, a piano tinkling in the background. It was much more posh than we expected, and not the type of restaurant either of us would frequent often at home, or elsewhere. It was dark, getting late, and after some discussion we decided to stay and eat.
It was after the spring rolls, but before the soup that the tears came. It was a quiet moment; I looked up, and saw Michelle's eyes glistening with tears. "It was that hand. The feel of the skin," she said. She said that in all of her time in Africa, four months working with a centre for street children in Tanzania, the everyday sight of beggars on the walk into town, and poverty of the surrounding small villages, that is was the feel of this child's hand that most affected her.
Every person reacts differently, and each person seems to have their own trigger. For Michelle, it was a child's hand.
What can one say to these kinds of emotions, especially when you still struggle with your own on the issue? What came to mind was a remembered, paraphrased line from a book I had recently read - "You get used to it, but you don't want to get too used to it."
Beyond this anecdote, the question of begging is a multi-facetted one and difficult one. Does one give or no? Who is deserving of your money and where do you stop? What about giving food instead of money? Is better to delay the altruistic gratification that comes from placing money in a person's hand and receiving that smile of thanks and give to an organization trying to help the problem on a more macro level? Is this just an excuse to get you through the chain of beggars, a promise to be forgotten when you get back home in your comfortable life? Does giving to children perpetuate a cycle, encouraging a society of begging that can eat away at a nation's drive for self-sufficiency and independence? What about places like India where there are reports of guilds of beggars who buy children, horribly mutilate them to increase their pathetic appeal in order to bring more money into a well organized business, for all intents and purposes?
These are the kinds of questions that only begin to scratch the surface of the magnitude of the problem. But having said all of this, in the end, it comes down to you, a set of eyes, an out stretched hand, and those extra coins in your pocket. What you choose is up to you. What will you do?
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