You are walking down a dirt road in the Philippines and come across a group of listless, filthy, rag clad children clustered around a toy made of a partially inflated plastic bag. They spot you and and run to you with hands up, then hang on your sleeves, singing ”give me, give me”. What do you do?
This is the most heart wrenching regular occurrence. The shockingly stark contrast of have and have not, and the truly vast gulf between the two. It can happen within a few miles of what used to be your home, or thousands of kilometres away. Over the years I have reacted in many different ways along the spectrum, and I offer my thoughts. I well understand that this is an philosophical refuge, without the corresponding acknowledgement of the moral call to action.
Begging is absolutely a learned local cultural choice. I have been relentlessly asked for lucre in many places (South Africa) and utterly, happily, ignored in many of the neighbouring places (Namibia). The scruffy kids who were hanging in the window of my moving car (Madagascar), or the tragic Syrian refugee families who swarm and follow you into shops (Beirut) tug at the heart, have adopted a local style, whereas you are invisible to the desperate poor of other culturally different places (Sri Lanka). Truly exceptional is Malawi, where the waitresses and security guards are perfectly comfortable asking you directly for money.
I can not fix the system or the government, or unlucky geography, or resource distribution, that permits so many people to be so terribly poor. I can not provide healthcare or jobs. Any handout from me will result in only a very short term benefit. Contrast begging with the more substantial animal, charity.
For me, it burns up too much bandwidth to individually evaluate and address every request for money. Instead I pick an arbitrary amount, give that away each day, and be comfortable saying ’no’. My current guiding principal is to throw my daily begging budget money at the terribly crippled ($100 to a most unfortunate man in Zimbabwe) and absolutely refrain from encouraging a new generation of relatively healthy beggars (with special appreciation for Zambia, where it was posted as illegal to give money to street children).
Final note on institutional begging. This is the Immigration official who walks you to an office to show your papers; the security guard who shows you where the entrance gate is. You will know immediately if there will be a ‘money for cold drink’ request. Again, this is a regional and cultural construct that happens relentlessly in some places, and not at all in most places. For some reason I am mostly fine paying this microtax.