Beggars; What is the proper response?
Beggars; What is the proper response?
JAKARTA (JP): There are some sights that one can never
properly get used to. In my case, it is the sight of leper-
beggars, limbs twisted, digits stunted, eyes rolling heavenward
pleadingly as they hunch or lie on the ground at intersections in
Jakarta.
I was thinking about this recently and cast my mind back to
the time about a year ago when the President made a speech to the
urban Poor Consortium and its followers at Senayan. Abdurrahman
"Gus Dur" Wahid flatly rejected any lifting of the ban on becak,
those non-polluting three-wheeler pedicabs still commonly found
beyond Jakarta. Another avenue for the poor to make an honest
living closed off, I thought. No wonder so many turn to begging.
I had just read a report on this speech when my taxi
approached a red light. The weather was vile, rain falling like
stair rods and there on the ground at the lights I could see a
leper stretched across one lane on his side, a stunted arm thrown
skywards in abject supplication. We stopped a yard or two from
him, and he hauled himself over, face contorted with misery.
One can affect unawareness, feign indifference or summon up
some other defense against such entreaties. And go away feeling a
somewhat lesser person, perhaps. I duly passed a little money
through the window, knowing that in such cases your contribution
will never be enough.
As the taxi moved away I was left to wonder, and not for the
first time, about the proper response to such situations and to
beggars in general.
Indeed, is there one? I thought of Dorothy Wordsworth who
coined the phrase, "the rant and cant of the staled beggar", as
she complained of the mendicants she encountered in England's
beautiful Lake District. And of that fine humane man, the
Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson railing against "the gross
parody of gratitude" he thought he saw in beggars.
What would they have made of this beggar's wretchedness, his
ground-down, eyeball-rolling abjection? Could they have gone by
on the other side?
Perhaps. And sometimes, like most of us, I do too, but not
without feeling some anger. When I see such outcasts, "the
wretched of the earth", abasing themselves near or even next to
places of worship a little red mist begins to form before my eyes
as indeed it does when the window of a BMW or Mercedes slides
open a little way and a coin is flicked out or a note dropped
like so much cigarette ash. Or hear people like the British
Conservative grandee Sir George Young moan about having to step
over beggars when leaving the opera.
But in truth I find something of a Stevensonian or
Wordsworthian reaction coming on when sound-limbed beggars,
usually women carrying their children as little bundles of moral
blackmail, paw at me or stick their bowls right under my nose
with a grunt. It is nonsense to equate the wretch on the ground
in the stair rod rain, ruined limbs and all, with these women,
poor though they may be. Nor can I sympathetically equate them
with the many blind beggars here that eke out such a mournful
existence.
The beggars of Jakarta are not, I think, the beggars of India,
some of whom have been deliberately mutilated to create an
"authentic" look. The tiny blind woman on the train the other
morning, her voice so spectral it hardly carried across the width
of the carriage. Where would she turn if not to the more generous
members of the public--and years of using all manner of Jakarta
public transport have taught me that the most generous Jakartans
tend to use lower cost means. As is the case with so many,
officialdom hardly seems to notice her except when from time to
time the bureaucrats declare war on the unfortunate and sweep
them off the streets. Out of sight, out of mind. To some minor
Gulag or workhouse to teach them "productive" skills?
I really don't know what the answer to my question is. What is
the proper response to beggars? All I can say is that it surely
cannot be found in making war on the blind, the halt, the lame,
the cruelly deformed.
-- David Jardine