In India you are confronted daily with the face of hunger. I have seen homeless people before in larger US cities, cities are gathering places for hopes, dreams, and futures-- those realized and those that have failed. I know that the face of homelessness is not always what you would expect, it's not just the children in the streets with long faces and cruelly ironic kwashiorkor bellies-- swollen not with food but malnutrition. It's not just the face on the corner with the bench-made-bed and the cardboard sign. It's not even just the pleading smiles on the bowed faces as they approach you in the middle of traffic, making motions towards their mouths, a sign so universally touching that it is almost impossible to keep your heart from being ripped from your chest. It is something that seems to never be solved by just another meal or another dollar bill, but what if you can't give anything
more than that?
Daniel has a saying every time he sees a tradition that he doesn't really agree with, which is "I don't want to support bad behavior." This is typically his feeling about panhandling, since there are government and other charitable institutions in the US that are purposefully for helping people who are low on food and funds. Most of the time if you give money to people on the street it propagates the activity of waiting for people to give you money on the street, instead of using other resources that are in place. That being said, I also feel like you ought to help those around you. We do give money to homeless people if we feel like it and we try to always smile and sometimes have conversations with people, when time allows. Generally we try and get food for people, but it's not always possible.
In general though, I don't really know what to think about poverty. It seems like a problem, if you don't have money to eat you don't have money for other things, like health care and good housing and education. If you have a society of starving people then how can you have a prosperous economy? But you also can't solve a problem with just money or pity. Also, I can't personally solve my own country's poverty issues, let alone do it for another country. I feel like in order to solve problems you need to be able to fully understand them, their causes, their faces and how they are manifest, and possible solutions. How could I possibly do all that?
It's hard to know just where I stand on the issue in India though. I suppose I have a few biases. One is that I know that a lot of the beggars I see on the street don't actually get to keep their money, but have handlers and I definitely don't want to encourage that behavior. Another bias is that I know I am targeted for being white. I know it sounds callous since I am American and am used to spending more money than them, but I hate people assuming that I have money to give to them, just because of the color of my skin. But I also don't know much about the Indian government programs or structure and so I don't honestly know if these people have places to turn. I have seen plenty of various religious places that offer food for the poor and I know that they don't live where they beg, because there aren't any around in early mornings when I first get up. Maybe they have homes, maybe they don't, I have no idea, but it's a different type of homelessness and poverty than in the US.
Although I don't always know the best way to feed it and I don't think it can be solved by money alone, I have never regretted being too generous. How do you deal with poverty?
