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