Beggars & Travel Rule #1
While traveling I have a number of hard and fast rules that I always stick to. One rule that I am particularly stubborn about is: I NEVER give to beggars. While this may at first sound a bit heartless, it is based on the logic that by giving to beggars, you are only encouraging them to continue to beg more. Development experts, social work scholars and even the governments of most countries will agree, giving to beggars is not a good thing to do (in many developing countries, particularly in tourist areas, you will see official signs posted that have this very message).
Turning down beggars is fairly easy when the beggar fits the caricature that the word conjures: a homeless, smelly, old, toothless man dressed in rags, with an open arm reaching up through venomous breath of stale beer and cheap cigarettes. My ‘no beggars’ rule proves a bit more challenging to stick to when the beggar is a child, with her tiny hands extended from tattered clothes, snot running from her nose, repeating, like a broken record, the only English word she knows: “money, money, money.” Although its often hard for me to resist the open hand of a child, I’ve learned to restrain the urge, although my heart sinks a bit every time I force myself to walk on by.
India’s major urban cities, with their overflowing cardboard shanty towns of twisted tin and crumbled
lives, greatly test my #1 travel rule. In many places, packs of street children haunt the tourist centers in search of handouts, while at nearly every intersection groups of soot covered children wander through the soupy, dusty humid air, amongst the traffic on momentary pause, reaching into every open car window.
In more than one instance, in seeing my non-Indian face, the kids (some as young as 3 or 4) have gathered in traffic around my open-topped rickshaw repeating, with out stretched grubby hands, “pawnee….pawnee.”
Pawnee being the Hindi word for “water.”
On one hand, giving it to them may lock them deeper into the cycle of poverty. On the other hand, their next drink may come from a sewer drain.
What do I do?
What you can do now:
- Leave a comment on the post below? What should I do?
- Learn more about the work to help the millions of children in poverty in India and consider making a donation to those doing good work through through Save The Children.
- Go see Slumdog Millionaire, if you already, encourage a friend to do so.
- Read my post on How to Change The World: A Hand Up, Not Out
April 2nd, 2009 at 8:44 am
My rule is to give food/water but not money.
April 4th, 2009 at 2:00 am
Janny, but do you think that even giving them food and water only encourages them to continue to beg for such things?
I’m not saying your wrong, but that’s always how I’ve thought about it?
Anyone else have thoughts on this?
(I had an Indian guy tell me a few days ago that people on the streets of India live by ‘the laws of the jungle,’ thus our way of thinking doesn’t always make sense.)
April 5th, 2009 at 2:10 am
No matter what you do, beggars will not disappear overnight.
It’s more about dealing with what you think than what you do.
I took beggar as a job. This job might disappear one day when the society is both economically and morally rich. I think human are heading to that direction, very slowly though.
So to me, it is alright either giving or not giving, food or money.
***
In your first picture, the street sign is ridiculous. The government should love the children both as a group and as individual. They don’t use their authority to gather money in the name of saving more people. That’s a weak ads.
April 5th, 2009 at 9:47 am
It might, but between encouraging them to beg and watching them die, the line has to be drawn somewhere. Not a sustainable solution, I know.
I agree with you, the development experts, social work scholars and the governments, but I would bend the rule depending on the circumstances. Remember the Tanzanian lesson? There are kids with the perfect aptitude, but we can only hope that some opportunities will fall from the sky for them.
Don’t children deserve proper nutrition even before they learn ‘the right way to live’?
April 5th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
I felt the same thing when I was in Cambodia. How do you say no to a child…or do we say no to all of them? You’ve got to be a little detached when you travel to places where hunger and begging are prevalent to say no.
I was eating outside at a restaurant in Siem Reap when a child no more than 6 with no shirt on approached and pointed at his mouth. We gave a plate of food and he gobbled it down. The restaurant tried to shoo him away but we said it was OK. What happened the next night to the kid? Did we encourage him to continue begging? Or did we honestly save him from a night of going to sleep hungry?